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Character.ai is getting into the microseries game.
The company, known for letting its users generate and engage with a suite of original and user-generated characters, is introducing “c.ai Series,” a collection of microseries
created using characters native to the Character.ai platform. In a blog post Thursday, the company said c.ai Series differs from traditional microseries because a user’s experience with the shows doesn’t end when the episodes finish, as those over the age of 18 can chat with the characters following the episode and roleplay new scenes within each universe.
“That creates a deeper connection between fans and Characters, and gives our studio team a new feedback loop as we learn which Characters, worlds, and stories people want to spend more time with,” the company says.
Character.ai’s expansion into microseries highlights the format’s increasing relevance, with some revenue projections for microseries hovering in the billions, and the expediency generative AI offers in producing them. It also allows Character.ai to leverage the entertainment value of its user-generated characters after years of litigation over its chatbots allegedly leading people toward self-harm or impersonating medical professionals. (Character.ai has said its user-generated characters are fictional and intended for entertainment purposes, though the company in January settled multiple lawsuits alleging mental health issues.)
The roughly one-to-two minute projects available at launch include “Last Summer,” a romance about a group of friends enjoying their final summer together before college; “The Nighttime Game,” a supernatural horror about a group of friends discovering a deadly card game that compels them to reveal secrets; and “Eden Fall,” an action-adventure that pulls characters into a video game’s fictional world to compete for a billion-dollar prize – and their lives.
“Starting with a studio-led model lets us set a high-quality bar for Character-driven Microdramas before opening the format more broadly,” the company said in the blog post. “Over time, our goal is to turn what we learn into tools that help creators and users make their own series from original Characters.”
An in-house studio generated each short-form project, an approach the company wrote “lets us set a high-quality bar for Character-driven Microdramas before opening the format more broadly.” However, even human-created AI projects seemingly can run into the snafus plaguing AI models trained on intellectual property: A review copy of the first episode of “Last Summer” featured a character drinking from a glass Coca-Cola bottle, though the logo was blurred in the episode’s public launch.
A source familiar with the production process said the shows rely on a mix of proprietary and third-party models, some of which may be trained on IP, and the Character.ai team reviews each show before launch. In this case, the Coca-Cola bottle slipped into the “Last Summer” press screener before the team’s review, and the source insisted the prop wouldn’t have made it to the public launch anyway.
Eventually, Character.ai hopes to introduce AI audio dramas, AI-generated books and tools to let users generate their own microseries with their own original characters.
“The larger opportunity is connected entertainment: stories people can watch, Characters they can chat with, worlds they can read or listen to, and eventually tools that let creators build across all of those formats,” the company wrote.
