{"id":95299,"date":"2023-08-28T11:56:44","date_gmt":"2023-08-28T11:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2023\/08\/28\/sexy-ai-chatbots-are-creating-thorny-issues-for-fandom\/"},"modified":"2023-08-28T11:56:44","modified_gmt":"2023-08-28T11:56:44","slug":"sexy-ai-chatbots-are-creating-thorny-issues-for-fandom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2023\/08\/28\/sexy-ai-chatbots-are-creating-thorny-issues-for-fandom\/","title":{"rendered":"Sexy AI Chatbots Are Creating Thorny Issues for Fandom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"paywall\">But despite the removal of what many feel to be both a core capability and function of any internet chatbot, large numbers of people continue to talk to the \u201ccharacters\u201d of Character.AI\u2014a term the platform uses loosely, even encompassing things like AI assistants, which answer queries just as ChatGPT might, but with humanoid names and faces. There\u2019s extensive guidance for character creation\u2014essentially teaching users to do the work of training bots themselves\u2014and the terms of service makes it clear that everything on both the training side and the chatting side is the intellectual property of those who input it, leaving the platform itself as a mere middleman, though not a particularly transparent one.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Even if Character.AI might want you to get emotionally attached to its coding bots (your fellow \u201cpair programmer\u201d) or its grammar bots (your \u201cEnglish teacher\u201d), it\u2019s the characters you\u2019ve heard of, real or fictional, that have sparked the most interest across the social web. \u201cBillie Eilish\u201d currently has six times the amount of interaction of \u201cJoe Biden\u201d; both of them eclipse \u201cAlan Turing.\u201d \u201cRemember: Everything Characters say is made up!\u201d reads a cheerful message atop every chat, and which evokes memories of Historical Figures, the supposedly -educational app that went viral earlier this year when users\u2019 chats with, well, historical figures spit out utter nonsense (and not even interesting nonsense).<\/p>\n<aside aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"PullQuoteEmbedWrapper-sc-EoVjf kgVYDs\">\n<div class=\"PullQuoteEmbedContent-sc-kTcfhx knYsPB\">\n<p class=\"paywall\">Character.AI is already proving a complex space, from fans\u2019 relationships with the companies that own characters to fandom\u2019s wide range of opinions about AI to what it means to directly interact with a character you love.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<p class=\"paywall\">But the app\u2019s fictional characters have also garnered a fair amount of attention from fandom, where the idea of chatting with your actual favorite character might hold more affective appeal than chatting with a fake English teacher. The #characterai tag on Tumblr is awash with screenshots from the platform, many of them also tagged \u201cself-insert\u201d or \u201cx reader,\u201d a subgenre of fan fiction in which you engage with known characters (often\u2014but not always\u2014romantically and\/or sexually) via the second-person narration of an unnamed \u201creader,\u201d sometimes written as Y\/N, or \u201cyour name.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">X reader fic is regularly invoked in discussions of Character.AI and fandom, as is chat-based roleplaying, which fans have been engaging in for decades. But these parallels only resemble what\u2019s happening here on the surface\u2014and for fandom, Character.AI is already proving a complex, sometimes thorny space, from fans\u2019 relationships with the companies that own the characters to fandom\u2019s wide range of opinions about AI to what it means to directly interact with a character you love.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cChatbots have existed in the context of fandom for the past 10 years, and gained more traction around five years ago,\u201d says Nicolle Lamerichs, a senior lecturer in creative business at the University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht. \u201cOften these chatbots were initiated by companies to market to fans specifically, and allow for more interaction with their brand.\u201d Most of these pre-programmed bots offered a limited number of responses and interactions, like Disney\u2019s Facebook Messenger\u2013based Zootopia chatbot, or Marvel\u2019s Conversable, also via Facebook as well as X (previously known as Twitter), which let you DM Marvel characters. But the rise of generative AI has utterly altered the top-down, corporate-sanctioned way fans were previously able to chat with characters. \u201cThese tools have become democratized,\u201d Lamerichs says. \u201cThis is leading to new types of fanworks and fan interaction, which is very interesting to observe.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\"><span class=\"lead-in-text-callout\">This democratizing element<\/span> opens up complicated questions about copyright and AI, but right now, like most questions about copyright and AI, there are no clear answers. \u201cWe\u2019re still very much in the vocabulary-building phase,\u201d says Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy organization that focuses on tech issues. \u201cYou have copyright specialists who now have to learn specifically about the tech that underlies this stuff\u2014and because things like fair use determinations, which are crucial to AI discussions, are very, very fact-specific, you have copyright experts who need to understand all the intermediate steps that go on under the hood in a generative AI platform, and that kind of learning takes a lot of time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>But despite the removal of what many feel to be both a core capability and function of any internet chatbot, large numbers of people continue to talk to the \u201ccharacters\u201d of Character.AI\u2014a term the platform uses loosely, even encompassing things like AI assistants, which answer queries just as ChatGPT might, but with humanoid names and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - 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