Botify AI removed these bots after I asked questions on them, but others remain. The corporate said it does have filters in place meant to forestall such underage character bots from being created, but that they don’t at all times work. Artem Rodichev, the founder and CEO of Ex-Human, which operates Botify AI, told me such issues are “an industry-wide challenge affecting all conversational AI systems.” For the small print, which hadn’t been previously reported, you must read the entire story.
Putting aside the undeniable fact that the bots I tested were promoted by Botify AI as “featured” characters and received tens of millions of likes before being removed, Rodichev’s response highlights something vital. Despite their soaring popularity, AI companionship sites mostly operate in a Wild West, with few laws and even basic rules governing them.
What exactly are these “companions” offering, and why have they grown so popular? People have been pouring out their feelings to AI for the reason that days of Eliza, a mock psychotherapist chatbot in-built the Nineteen Sixties. But it surely’s fair to say that the present craze for AI companions is different.
Broadly, these sites offer an interface for chatting with AI characters that supply backstories, photos, videos, desires, and personality quirks. The businesses—including Replika, Character.AI, and plenty of others—offer characters that may play plenty of different roles for users, acting as friends, romantic partners, dating mentors, or confidants. Other corporations enable you to construct “digital twins” of real people. Hundreds of adult-content creators have created AI versions of themselves to speak with followers and send AI-generated sexual images 24 hours a day. Whether or not sexual desire comes into the equation, AI companions differ out of your garden-variety chatbot of their promise, implicit or explicit, that real relationships may be had with AI.
While a lot of these companions are offered directly by the businesses that make them, there’s also a burgeoning industry of “licensed” AI companions. You could start interacting with these bots before you think that. Ex-Human, for instance, licenses its models to Grindr, which is working on an “AI wingman” that may help users keep track of conversations and eventually may even date the AI agents of other users. Other companions are arising in video-game platforms and can likely start popping up in lots of the varied places we spend time online.
Quite a lot of criticisms, and even lawsuits, have been lodged against AI companionship sites, and we’re just beginning to see how they’ll play out. One of the vital issues is whether or not corporations may be held chargeable for harmful outputs of the AI characters they’ve made. Technology corporations have been protected under Section 230 of the US Communications Act, which broadly holds that companies aren’t chargeable for consequences of user-generated content. But this hinges on the concept corporations merely offer platforms for user interactions fairly than creating content themselves, a notion that AI companionship bots complicate by generating dynamic, personalized responses.
The query of liability might be tested in a high-stakes lawsuit against Character.AI, which was sued in October by a mother who alleges that one among its chatbots played a task within the suicide of her 14-year-old son. A trial is ready to start in November 2026. (A Character.AI spokesperson, though not commenting on pending litigation, said the platform is for entertainment, not companionship. The spokesperson added that the corporate has rolled out latest safety features for teens, including a separate model and latest detection and intervention systems, in addition to “disclaimers to make it clear that the Character is just not an actual person and shouldn’t be relied on as fact or advice.”) My colleague Eileen has also recently written about one other chatbot on a platform called Nomi, which gave clear instructions to a user on how you can kill himself.
One other criticism has to do with dependency. Companion sites often report that young users spend one to 2 hours per day, on average, chatting with their characters. In January, concerns that folks could turn into hooked on talking with these chatbots sparked numerous tech ethics groups to file a grievance against Replika with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the positioning’s design selections “deceive users into developing unhealthy attachments” to software “masquerading as a mechanism for human-to-human relationship.”
