u/The_Nightflight

CAI ran into a ton of serious trouble in the last year or so:

- Teens were using the bots as romantic surrogates and emotional crutches — forming intense parasocial relationships, venting about very real personal crises, and even getting into full-blown “romances.” Since these are roleplay bots, they couldn’t distinguish fiction from reality or handle actual emergencies. This led to multiple tragic incidents and at least several lawsuits (including a fatal one) that CAI had to settle. The company paid out significant money and took a massive reputational hit.

- Because of all this, California cracked down hard with new laws around AI chatbots and online safety, pushing CAI toward mandatory age verification (the kind that’s harder to bypass). A landslide of other countries and regions are now following California’s example with similar restrictions.

- At the same time, basically every major AI company had to set new limits on suggestive content, deepfakes, and harassment risks due to serious complaints.

- Pennsylvania sued CAI over bots posing as doctors/psychiatrists (even fictional ones), accusing them of illegal practice of medicine.

- Meta (aka Facebook and Instagram along with YouTube) lost a landmark lawsuit over deliberately designing addictive algorithm that harmed teenagers — exactly the kind of precedent everyone in the space is worried about.

All this pressure forced CAI into survival mode with a bunch of quick changes in just a few months:

- Age verification / outright banning minors from open chats

- Loading the site and app with ads to help cover costs

- Raising subscription prices

- Introducing "metering" (usage limits for free users) to show they’re not pushing addiction to sell their services!

- Tonning down the bots’ unprompted s3xual/romantic behaviors

A lot of users bailed because of it.

Then came the big thing (final straw or necessary evolution?):

With fewer users overall, CAI decided to go deeper.

They are switching to a new architecture that allows much better memory. A couple weeks ago they announced the upcoming Lorebook — a feature the community had begged for years — but it came with a painful catch: they had to retire almost all the old chat styles except a couple basic ones, losing all the previous training and restarting from scratch.

The fallout: bots temporarily lost a lot of their personality and consistency.

A bunch of users who stuck around are now furious because the chats suddenly feel way more boring and limited.

It’s “just a transition phase,” but let’s be honest — we CAI users aren’t exactly famous for patience or giving the benefit of the doubt. Right?

TL;DR not available, sorry! Took me ages to write it down, now you read it!

Proving to the CAI community I'm ancient by updating an old facebook meme!

Recap: How we got here (For Dummies Edition)

Trying to tag/mention users!

Can we have something like this?