A growing number of people, mostly young, are forming emotional connections with their chatbots. A lot of those chatbots are "homemade", made by regular people.
On platforms like Character.AI, which has over 20 million monthly active users (with people spending two plus hours a day on the platform), there's a large subculture devoted to making bots and roleplay characters.
The people making and using these bots are students, game designers, people with day jobs that have nothing to do with AI. What they share is an obsession with making a bot's personality feel real.
They gather in online communities to trade creation guides, debug personality code, critique each other's bots, and argue about what artificial intelligence means.
I spent two years lurking in their communities, this page holds things I found and kept.
