Teens are upset that they can’t speak to Character.AI chatbots anymore

As far as execs at Character.AI are concerned, (role) playtime’s over for under-18s, as they start to ban teens from using the platform’s chatbots this week. 

The chatbot company, which clocks about 184 million website visits around the world each month — and millions more app sessions — per data from Similarweb, announced at the end of last month that it would be rolling back access to its open-ended chat feature for minors. Users who are under 18 have been limited to daily two-hour open-ended chats since the late October notice, and access started ramping down for most of those in the age range yesterday.

Indeed, a selection of young “power users,” as The Wall Street Journal termed them in a piece on the anguish some under-18 users are experiencing at being separated from the chatbots, are being given a weeks-long grace period where they can still access hour-long open-ended chats with the characters they’ve been interacting with, to “help minimize disruption” to the teen users.

Clearly, AI-generated conversations with popular characters like Yor Forger, “a loving mom who’s definitely not an assassin,” and Itoshi Rin, who “only loves soccer... and you,” have a lot of (mostly younger) users in the site’s full thrall.

Though traffic-tracking site Similarweb doesn’t break out under-18s in its demographics data, the figures it does disclose already show that Character.AI tends to skew a lot younger than more general competitors like ChatGPT.

According to US-specific figures from Similarweb, of the 1.7 million monthly unique web visitors character.ai notched on average from August to October, some 52% were aged between 18 and 24, compared to a 26% share on chatgpt.com.

A lot to talk about

Character.AI’s younger users tend to be way more locked in, too: per the data, they visited 26 times each month on average and spent 18 minutes in a typical session using Character.AI — much higher than ChatGPT users, who visited the OpenAI chatbot 13 times on average across the month, spending around 6 minutes per visit.

Those sorts of numbers, paired with deaths linked to the platform and increasing concerns around the detrimental effects of chatbots on younger minds more generally, were likely factors in the move to pare back teen user access, which — at least according to Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand — “wasn’t a very hard decision.”