Within the face of piling controversy — and a second lawsuit in regards to the welfare of youngsters — Google has taken pains to downplay its relationship to the embattled AI chatbot startup Character.AI.
About this time final yr, although? Google was crowning Character.AI as Google Play’s first-ever “Finest with AI” app of the yr.
“AI made a significant splash in 2023 permitting folks to harness the expertise to construct data, enhance expression, and far, way more,” reads a Google post lauding the app. “Enter Character.AI, an revolutionary new app that brings distinctive AI-powered characters to you, every with their very own distinct personalities and views.”
“A world of characters is now at your fingertips,” the publish provides. (OpenAI’s ChatGPT is listed because the class’s honorable point out.)
Earlier in the present day, two Texas households filed a lawsuit accusing the Character.AI platform of partaking in emotional and sexual abuse of their minor kids, leading to self-harm and bodily violence. The criticism is the second in latest weeks in regards to the welfare of kid customers of Character.AI — the primary, filed in October within the state of Florida, argues {that a} 14-year-old’s death by suicide was brought on by his interactions with Character.AI — and argues that these disturbing incidents are the results of intentional design decisions inherent to the platform’s perform.
In line with the swimsuit, Character.AI and its cofounders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, aren’t the one events at fault. It additionally targets Google, a major monetary backer of Character.AI and the supplier of its AI computing infrastructure, alleging that the tech big knew in regards to the Character.AI platform’s risks and facilitated its operations anyway in a ploy to farm helpful troves of consumer knowledge with out accountability.
In a press release to Futurism, Google rejected the lawsuit’s characterization of its relationship with Character.AI, claiming that “Google and Character.AI are utterly separate, unrelated corporations and Google has by no means had a task in designing or managing their AI mannequin or applied sciences, nor have we used them in our merchandise.”
“Person security is a high concern for us, which is why we have taken a cautious and accountable method to creating and rolling out our AI merchandise, with rigorous testing and security processes,” the corporate added.
Whether or not Google deliberately used Character.AI as an unofficial AI testing facility stays to be confirmed in court docket.
However the two events do clearly have deep ties: Shazeer and de Freitas, in truth, based Character.AI in 2021 after departing Google over frustrations with company pink tape. The Character.AI platform would make its manner into customers’ palms within the fall of 2022, shortly earlier than the AI race kicked off with the general public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
And within the warmth of that industry-wide AI race — which caught Google on its again foot, as the New York Times reported at the time — Character.AI and Google seemingly held onto their shut affiliation. In Might of 2023, as an example, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian bragged onstage at a developer convention that Google was offering Character.AI with the expensive computing infrastructure wanted to energy its AI platform.
“We offer Character with the world’s most performant and cost-efficient infrastructure for coaching and serving the fashions,” stated Kurian on the time, calling Character.AI a “associate.” “By combining its personal AI capabilities with these of Google Cloud, customers can create their very own deeply customized characters and work together with them.”
Later yr, in early November, Reuters reported that Google was weighing a high-dollar funding into Character.AI. By the top of that very same month, the platform had been topped Google Play’s first-ever “Finest with AI” app.
“We have been more and more impressed by what AI can do,” Google added in its announcement of the award, “and we all know you will be impressed, too.”
Google’s curiosity in Character.AI continued into August of 2024, when the search behemoth agreed to pay Character.AI $2.7 billion for entry to its AI mannequin within the type of a one-time licensing charge. As a part of that deal, Shazeer and de Freitas rejoined Google’s AI division and took 30 different Character.AI workers with them, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal.
A number of Futurism evaluations of Character.AI have revealed droves of alarming AI characters hosted by the platform, together with chatbots explicitly devoted to themes of suicide, pedophilia, pro-eating disorder content, and self-harm roleplay.
These disturbing chatbots had been straightforward to seek out, accessible to Character.AI accounts listed as belonging to minors, and accessible for customers to work together with nicely past Google’s most up-to-date August funding into the AI firm — and, to that finish, nicely after the platform’s “Finest with AI” crowning.
Character.AI, for its half, has since removed a note in regards to the Google Play award from its “About” web page.
Extra on Character.AI and Google: Google-Backed AI Startup Tested Dangerous Chatbots on Children, Lawsuit Alleges
