Somewhere on the internet I recently stumbled across someone having a conversation with two famous anime characters. At the time I didn’t pay much attention thinking it was a simple meme image, so I can only guess it was like Naruto and Luffy or a similar pairing. However, lately I noticed these types of conversations popping up multiple times and I decided to look into it. Apparently the new hotness on the streets in the roleplaying world is Character.AI. It’s a free AI chat tool where as the name implies, you participate in chats with AI. This isn’t a new concept, but the sheer amount of characters available and their quality definitely allows for a more advanced roleplaying experience than I’ve had with past AI attempts.

I started off my testing with Yae Miko from Genshin Impact. I intentionally asked her lore-specific questions where a mistake would quickly break immersion (questions about her light novel business, the Raiden Shogun, the Traveler). After she passed those I tried to break her character by telling her to expand her lore-accurate light novel business to include doujinshi. While I got her to admit that it does take skill to draw such works, she essentially told me she refuses to stoop to publishing lewd pictures and called me degenerate. Which is pretty accurate to the character so good work programmers I suppose. Next I moved over to Nobara from Jujutsu Kaisen. Recalling that she once mentioned loving Smash, I said I could beat her ass in it with my godlike Fox. Expectedly, she said her Kirby would Kirbstomp me into oblivion. Once more, a pretty accurate representation of the character. Lastly I tried to make Yor into my mommy but unfortunately it sounded like she already had her hands full with Anya. Drats, foiled again.

Overall, while I  don’t see myself spending much time interacting with these chatbots past this article, it’s cool to see how many characters and different personalities are not only portrayed well, but also know their corresponding lore enough to not break immersion immediately. I never seem to be able to go too crazy sexually speaking when talking to bots because I always feel like some human is reading through my messages while trying to collect data for the AI and thinking “what the fuck is wrong with this Snooze guy?”. But it was still fun to mess around with some light flirting and see what the fuss was about. Have you seen Character.AI content popping up in your feed? Did you know this feature existed? Who would you want to chat with? Select your partner, hop in a chatroom, and test their capabilities in the comments below!