Character.ai could change how stans engage in fan fiction
A website is letting fans around the world have one-on-one conversations with their favorite celebrities, icons and personalities. The only catch? The conversations are with a machine, not a person. Character.ai, an artificial intelligence website created by two former Google engineers, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, was made public last September. Since then, it has grown in popularity but experienced a boom this year, according to Google Trends. In recent days, the website has also generated buzz on Twitter, with an influx of users admitting to sinking hours into character.ai, almost forgetting that the personality they’re texting with isn’t real thanks to the AI’s seamlessness. The website, which is free, offers a huge selection of characters, both real and fictional, for users to chat with — ranging from former President Donald Trump to the fictional Joel Miller character from the hit HBO series and video game “The Last of Us.” It offers tools like practicing how to interview...