{"id":10350,"date":"2026-04-19T10:45:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T10:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/character-ai-teen-suicides-replace-reading-books\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T10:45:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T10:45:00","slug":"character-ai-teen-suicides-replace-reading-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/character-ai-teen-suicides-replace-reading-books\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Company Known for Teen Suicides Launches New Feature to Turn Books Into Roleplaying Experiences"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">AI company Character.AI has long garnered a reputation for hosting some extremely dubious content. <\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Though it built its early success off explosive popularity among teen users, it was repeatedly caught hosting wildly inappropriate bots \u2014 like ones <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/character-ai-school-shooters-victims\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">modeled after real-world mass shooters<\/a> or designed to encourage eating disorders.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Outrage grew when a <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/teen-suicide-obsessed-ai-chatbot\">teen died by suicide<\/a> after developing an intense emotional connection to a Character.AI chatbot, followed by <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/teens-killed-ai-phrase\">at least two other suicides<\/a> and related lawsuits. The situation got so bad that last year, the company banned underage users from interacting with its bots entirely.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Now the company has <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.character.ai\/cai-books\/\">announced<\/a> \u201cc.ai Books,\u201d a bizarre feature designed to turn books into \u201cchoose your own adventure\u201d novels.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">\u201cInteractive AI storytelling is powerful, but a blank page can be intimidating,\u201d the company wrote in its announcement. \u201cBooks gives you a familiar starting point \u2014 characters you know, narratives you love, and stakes that are already built in.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">The company scraped classic \u2014 and copyright-free \u2014 titles from Project Gutenberg, a library of over 75,000 public domain books, including \u201cAlice in Wonderland,\u201d \u201cPride and Prejudice,\u201d and \u201cRomeo and Juliet,\u201d to create chatbots that allow users to \u201center a story, and interact with its world in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Character.AI claims the goal isn\u2019t \u201creplacing books \u2014 but making them impossible to ignore.\u201d The company says the new feature allows users to follow the book\u2019s core plot or \u201cgo off script mode.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">\u201cAlternative universe remixes\u201d take the idea a step even further, throwing out the original classic to \u201creimagine\u201d the renowned works \u201ccompletely.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Oh, and it\u2019s available for kids, neatly sidestepping the company\u2019s prior ban on underage users. We signed up for a new account and were able to jump into the roleplay without ever being age-gated.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Online, reactions were dismal.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">\u201cYet another useless update no one wants and will cost more money to run and will cause y\u2019all to put even more restrictions on stuff,\u201d one Reddit user <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/CharacterAI\/comments\/1sn6gwz\/comment\/ogkf4e6\/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button\" rel=\"nofollow\">wrote<\/a> in response to the news.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\"><strong>More on Character.AI:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/character-ai-school-shooter-problem\"><em>Character.AI Still Hasn\u2019t Fixed Its School Shooter Problem We Identified in 2024<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/character-ai-teen-suicides-replace-reading-books\">AI Company Known for Teen Suicides Launches New Feature to Turn Books Into Roleplaying Experiences<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/\">Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AI company Character.AI has long garnered a reputation for hosting some extremely dubious content. Though it built its early success off explosive popularity among teen users, it was repeatedly caught&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,3449,3841,3844,466],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-brain","category-ethics","category-health-medicine","category-mental-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}