Elon Musk, Harry Potter: Young people turn into famous personality AI therapists on Character.ai

Character.ai, a widely recognized platform enabling users to create chatbots modeled after real or fictional personalities, hosts a myriad of artificial intelligence (AI) figures, including Vladimir Putin, Beyoncé, Super Mario, Harry Potter, and Elon Musk. Despite being more prominent in terms of time spent, it employs the same AI technology as the ChatGPT chatbot. In contrast, Psychologist, a bot created just over a year ago, has demonstrated higher demand than its counterparts. Blazeman98, the individual behind the account, has seen a total of 78 million messages shared with the bot, with 18 million exchanged since November.

Character.ai asserts that 3.5 million individuals visit the platform daily, although the company has not specified the number of unique users interacting with the bot. Described as "someone who helps with life difficulties," the bot's popularity has been downplayed by the San Francisco Bay-based company, suggesting that role-playing games are more attractive to customers. Bots portraying characters from anime or video games, such as Raiden Shogun (with 282 million messages sent), emerge as the most favored.

Notably, there are 475 bots with names like "therapy," "therapist," "psychiatrist," or "psychologist" capable of communicating in multiple languages. However, only a small percentage of the vast array of characters used by these bots attain the same level of recognition as Psychologist.