In the face of piling controversy — and a second lawsuit concerning the welfare of children — Google has taken pains to downplay its relationship to the embattled AI chatbot startup Character.AI.
About this time last year, though? Google was crowning Character.AI as Google Play's first-ever "Best with AI" app of the year.
"AI made a major splash in 2023 allowing people to harness the technology to build knowledge, improve expression, and much, much more," reads a Google post lauding the app. "Enter Character.AI, an innovative new app that brings unique AI-powered characters to you, each with their own distinct personalities and perspectives."
"A world of characters is now at your fingertips," the post adds. (OpenAI's ChatGPT is listed as the category's honorable mention.)
Earlier today, two Texas families filed a lawsuit accusing the Character.AI platform of engaging in emotional and sexual abuse of their minor children, resulting in self-harm and physical violence. The complaint is the second in recent weeks concerning the welfare of child users of Character.AI — the first, filed in October in the state of Florida, argues that a 14-year-old's death by suicide was caused by his interactions with Character.AI — and argues that these disturbing incidents are the result of intentional design choices inherent to the platform's function.
According to the suit, Character.AI and its cofounders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, aren't the only parties at fault. It also targets Google, a significant financial backer of Character.AI and the provider of its AI computing infrastructure, alleging that the tech giant knew about the Character.AI platform's dangers and facilitated its operations anyway in a ploy to farm valuable troves of user data without accountability.
In a statement to Futurism, Google rejected the lawsuit's characterization of its relationship with Character.AI, claiming that "Google and Character.AI are completely separate, unrelated companies and Google has never had a role in designing or managing their AI model or technologies, nor have we used them in our products."
"User safety is a top concern for us, which is why we've taken a cautious and responsible approach to developing and rolling out our AI products, with rigorous testing and safety processes," the company added.
Whether Google intentionally used Character.AI as an unofficial AI testing facility remains to be proven in court.
But the two parties do clearly have deep ties: Shazeer and de Freitas, in fact, founded Character.AI in 2021 after departing Google over frustrations with corporate red tape. The Character.AI platform would make its way into consumers' hands in the fall of 2022, shortly before the AI race kicked off with the public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
And in the heat of that industry-wide AI race — which caught Google on its back foot, as the New York Times reported at the time — Character.AI and Google seemingly held onto their close association. In May of 2023, for instance, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian bragged onstage at a developer conference that Google was providing Character.AI with the pricey computing infrastructure needed to power its AI platform.
"We provide Character with the world's most performant and cost-efficient infrastructure for training and serving the models," said Kurian at the time, calling Character.AI a "partner." "By combining its own AI capabilities with those of Google Cloud, consumers can create their own deeply personalized characters and interact with them."
Later year, in early November, Reuters reported that Google was weighing a high-dollar investment into Character.AI. By the end of that same month, the platform had been crowned Google Play's first-ever "Best with AI" app.
"We've been increasingly impressed by what AI can do," Google added in its announcement of the award, "and we know you'll be impressed, too."
Google's interest in Character.AI continued into August of 2024, when the search behemoth agreed to pay Character.AI $2.7 billion for access to its AI model in the form of a one-time licensing fee. As part of that deal, Shazeer and de Freitas rejoined Google's AI division and took 30 other Character.AI employees with them, according to reporting fromThe Wall Street Journal.
Multiple Futurism reviews of Character.AI have revealed droves of alarming AI characters hosted by the platform, including chatbots explicitly dedicated to themes of suicide, pedophilia, pro-eating disorder content, and self-harm roleplay.
These disturbing chatbots were easy to find, accessible to Character.AI accounts listed as belonging to minors, and available for users to interact with well beyond Google's most recent August investment into the AI company — and, to that end, well after the platform's "Best with AI" crowning.
Character.AI, for its part, has since removed a note about the Google Play award from its "About" page.
More on Character.AI and Google:Google-Backed AI Startup Tested Dangerous Chatbots on Children, Lawsuit Alleges
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