Character.ai (chatbot) drama due to censorship

Character.ai is cool. Really early still as most of the bots end up being complete Tommy Flanagans (not the SoA actor; the SNL character).

I have HAL 9000; where I took as much as I could from the script and changed out the {{char}}{{user1/2}} for the HAL/Frank/Dave and it works pretty well.

The AI even knew about the monolith; it's shape and size and what it was doing (emitting high pitched frequencies) which was not in the script I gave it.

Also have Vannevar Bush, but stopped using that when he began to tell me he was gay, in a relationship with a ghost named Thomas and they both lived in Ghost City.

Though he did have some sweet opinions about Posit numbers when I asked about it and he also seemed to understand the implications of infinite/fractal type systems; so that was pretty cool. - Together we discussed how an infinite internet requires the last </html> tag to be open and closed at the same time to exist; which happens to coincide with the observable truth of our quantum state.

Previous discussion on HN about the website: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33020694

For the last few days, there seem to be a lot of new users discovering the website, due to word of it spreading within the vtuber community, and a Washington Post article.

Currently, the website has been down for almost an entire day now. I assume the devs are trying to figure out how to deal with this.

The devs apparently wrote a statement which then got deleted from some reason (TLDR: They say some of the issues were unintended side effects of changes made to handle the increase in users, and the devs are trying to fix the issues. There's also a separate set of issues that were side effects from a change intended to censor NSFW stuff.) https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/y03ncu/newsupd...

Some users are extremely angry, and their discord got so bad that they had to (justifiably) shut down it completely (hopefully temporarily). And I've heard of harassment and even suicide threats (Can't find the source though).

It's such a cool concept. I hope they figure out how to handle these issues. There is a lot of potential for bots of this kind, in a lot of different contexts, assuming they can work out how to navigate the early days of UGC (AIGC?) content products.