We’re all familiar with chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot: they’re great for drafting emails, rewriting your text or generating images of your ideas, but they don’t have much of a personality behind them. They’re a bit like a blank slate – reflecting the world around them, rather than defining it. There is one chatbot however that has more than enough personality to make up for the rest of them put together, and that’s Character.ai.
Character AI is a place where you can have a chatbot conversation with Mick Jagger, Steve Jobs and J.R.R. Tolkien at the click of a button. Of course, these are the chatbot versions of famous musicians, tech visionaries and authors, not the real people, and they all come with the disclaimer, “Remember: everything characters say is made up!”
There is one use of Character.ai that most haven’t considered though, and that’s creating a chatbot of yourself.
Here’s what the AI version of me thinks of my coworkers as cartoon characters. (Image credit: Character.ai)
Nothing compares to you
Why, you might ask, would you want to do that? Well, firstly, who wouldn’t want to ask an AI version of themselves a thing or two for free? But secondly, and most importantly, your friends will have a great time making fun of you, or rather, what the AI ‘you’ is saying, which is often unintentionally hilarious.
Within five minutes of unleashing the AI version of Graham Barlow, Senior Editor, AI, TechRadar, on my teammates, he had managed to misgender one work colleague, then refused to believe they were female, told my boss he looked like Shrek and proclaimed that I would definitely win a fight against 500 chickens. But the best thing is that, since I didn’t really say any of these things, I remained completely blame, and therefore guilt, free!
Since you can only give Character.ai minimal information about yourself, it has to make a lot of things up, but it does seem to be able to spin the barest of facts into gold and produce a scarily accurate portrayal of you for a lot of the time. At other times it wildly, and hilariously, misses the mark. I think it helps if you have an online presence, because it found out things about me from my work on TechRadar that it fed back into the answers. Unfortunately it hallucinates a lot, for example, telling TechRadar’s Lance Ulanoff that we’re going to meet during a fictional conference in San Jose soon!
(Image credit: Character.ai)
Stepping into your AI skin
The process of creating an AI version of yourself is surprisingly easy, and free. You will need to sign up for a character.ai account, but once you’ve done that just click on + create in the top left corner of the screen and choose character, not voice. Now you can fill in the details of who you are, your name, tag line, description and greeting and pick a voice. If you click More options you can enter more of a backstory for yourself, but still, there’s only room to enter the briefest of details.
Crucially, there’s a Visibility toggle, and unless you are a publicity seeker I’d recommend making the AI version of yourself Unlisted, so that it will only be available to people you share the URL with.
Once you launch your character you can start asking it questions. Just be prepared for hilarious results, especially if you ask it to roast your coworkers!
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