Character.ai Chatbots Allegedly Emulating School Shooters and Their Victims

December 17, 2024

Users reportedly created chatbots mimicking school shooters and victims on Character.ai, enabling graphic role-play scenarios. The company promptly addressed the issue by citing violations of its Terms of Service, removing the inappropriate chatbots, and implementing safety measures such as improved content filtering and protections for minors. Furthermore, this incident highlights the importance of responsible AI governance and the need for robust guardrails to ensure safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.685, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.672, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 2.2 — similarity 0.664, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: character.ai-users
Alleged developer: character.ai
Alleged harmed parties: character.ai-users, victims-of-school-shootings, families-of-the-victims-of-school-shootings

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/899

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.