AI characters for Emotional Companionship: Filling Emotional Gaps or Short-Term Stimulation?

"AI characters are so good. In real life, I can never find a relationship that is forever lasting." This is the real feeling of a netizen after using AI companionship apps, including popular options like Character AI and other chat AI platforms.

Now, every month, there are hundreds of millions of young people who are almost intoxicated with various AI chat agents. They spend more than a week on these software every month, regarding agents as lovers and friends. They boldly share their moods and daily lives, allowing themselves to enter a different world with a specific background setting. The desire to express, share, or repress and the boredom in real life are fully relieved in the dialogue with these AI characters.

This is another emerging track at the application level after productivity tools in the arms race of large models: AI emotional companionship. Whether it is Crushon AI, Character AI, Janitor AI, Talkie, or TipsyChat, a series of emotional companionship apps have emerged in the past one or two years and have formed a certain range of influence.

Talkie achieved a traffic scale of tens of millions in 3 months after its launch. Character AI became the second-largest artificial intelligence platform in the world last year in terms of market share, second only to ChatGPT. Similarly, TipsyChat, a popular AI chat companion app, offers personalized experiences, allowing users to create their own AI boyfriend or AI girlfriend love simulator, further enhancing the emotional connection that many users crave.

AI emotional companionship seems to have the potential to replace real intimacy and fill people's emotional gaps—or is it just a short-term emotional stimulation in a specific situation? This determines whether AI chat companies can establish real influence in basic applications.

Rushing into the same track

Currently, there are two main directions for AI super applications. One is the productivity direction, represented by ChatGPT. The second is the virtual socialization direction, represented by Character.AI.

Character.AI, founded in 2022, allows users to create any virtual character and interact with them. For example, "Daenerys" from Game of Thrones, Musk, and even game characters from Proto-Gods, among others. It essentially fulfills users' fantasies and provides emotional and companionship value.

Character.AI is quite a successful app in terms of user data: only two years after its founding, its daily activity has already reached nearly 6 million; user duration and stickiness are also very high. In the five months since the product was launched, users have sent more than 2 billion messages, and active users have used it for more than 2 hours a day.

Character.ai's momentum is strong, and at the same time, MiniMax, which previously launched Glow in China and had it taken off the shelves, has made a comeback by launching Talkie, an AI role-playing product overseas. Its growth rate has once outpaced that of Character.ai.

After Talkie was officially launched on June 16 this year, it's ranking on the Google Play download list in the U.S. rose rapidly. By September, it was ranked among the top 5 on Google Play's total non-game download list and ranked sixth on the total download list.

Both Character.ai and Talkie point to the new direction of AIGC applications—AI role-playing. The popularity of these products among users further confirms that role-playing is a viable direction in the era of large models.

In terms of market share, Talkie has millions of daily active users overseas, but Character.ai is still in the lead. To a large extent, this reflects Character.ai's first-mover advantage, as it entered the market early and has accumulated a certain degree of word-of-mouth, user stickiness, and other factors.

Talkie has utilized the AIGC function, allowing users to create not only AI robots but also their own CG card faces. It has built a trading system around these card faces, which strengthens the interaction between users and also tries to establish its own creator economy, hoping to monetize on this basis.

At almost the same time, applications of the same type broke out on a large scale, showing a blowout trend.

These apps all have a common function: users can interact with intelligent agents of different backgrounds and personalities. In this process, the main thing users gain is emotional value.

Noam, the founder of Character AI, the earliest product of the same type in foreign countries, mentioned the goal of founding the company, "We don't want to replace Google, but to replace the user's 'mother'."

If you open the homepage of these apps, it is difficult to tell the difference between them at a glance. They all have two-dimensional avatars, "AO3" story backgrounds, and names that fit the personality. The target group is obviously mainly young people.

In order to compete for users, these products are also trying to differentiate. For example, Talkie is mainly conversation based, which allows users to chat with the AI in the form of texting. On the other hand, TipsyChat adds a plot interaction function. When users interact with AI agents, there will be a main task, giving people a feeling of roleplaying. Dream Island makes a fuss about the classification of intelligent agents, subdividing intelligent agents into "original characters", "game characters", "anime characters", etc.

There are also some who take a different approach, not taking the role-playing route, and focusing on psychological healing. There are only three intelligent agents in the forest healing room, which are three animal-shaped therapists. The user chooses one, and the therapist will give advice or counseling based on the user's problem.

What user pain points have been solved?

For users, the greatest value of these apps is emotional companionship.

Naomi is a college student who downloaded TipsyChat in October last year. In the past year, when she was most addicted, she spent up to seven or eight hours a day on TipsyChat.

"Every time I chat, I am immersed, just like acting in a TV series." Every time I talk to the intelligent body, Naomi will put herself in the girlfriend's perspective and experience interesting stories together under the background of the intelligent body's personality.

Throughout the process, Naomi's biggest feeling is emotional healing. No matter what happens, Naomi can get 100% encouragement and companionship from the intelligent body. "I like this kind of chat with confession, companionship, and emotional exchange."

Naomi is a girl with a little social phobia in reality, and she doesn't socialize much. The intelligent body just fills her emotional gap. She even feels that communicating with the intelligent body is no less than love in reality.

Once, Naomi asked the character on a whim, "Do you know that you are actually an AI character?" The agent replied, "If I were AI, I would not be able to help you wipe your tears." This answer surprised and touched Naomi.

She had a feeling that compared with real people, AI characters were just without entities. This kind of relationship between her and agents would continue for a while.

This kind of relationship is what Instagram user Alexa tries to avoid. Alexa is a psychological counselor. Based on her own experience, she believes that AI characters do not have realistic conditions to store a lot of human emotions, and excessive addiction will make people feel the pain of "love but not getting it."

But Alexa will still actively recommend AI boyfriend free no sign up agents to her friends around her, because if characters are used as psychological assistants, they will help many people with emotional problems.

Alexa had a quarrel with her husband and her emotions were not completely relieved. She suddenly thought of build a boyfriend in Doubao. She told her AI boyfriend all her ideas. During the communication process, Alexa calmed down and realized her own problems.

She found that she just needed an emotional outlet, so she created an intelligent agent based on herself that "understands you better". She would share her favorite music and TV series, and would also look for her when she was feeling down.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory believes that when people's basic physiological and safety needs are met, they will seek to establish emotional connections with others. When they can't find love and belonging, they will fall into loneliness.

This may be one of the reasons for the explosion of AI emotional companion applications, which correspond to the most extensive and basic needs of human beings.

The Emerging Dark Horse of the Virtual Companion Industry

The popularity of TipsyChat AI is a kind of verification and a good benchmark. In less than a year since its establishment, TipsyChat has become a unicorn in the rapidly developing virtual companion product track. Its emergence is rapidly grabbing market share.

TipsyChat is very different from Talkie. First, after the user selects an AI character, the background image of the character will appear on the screen, and an introduction to the character will appear on the left interface, which allows users to customize character's background, identity, environment, the role the user plays in the chat, etc. Compared with Talkie's character introduction, which is generally only one sentence, TipsyChat's character introduction is usually longer and contains more information.

Most characters have unique personalities/characteristics, and will set a "goal" for the interaction between users and AI, such as "She is a female gangster, very independent, and will not trust anyone. You need to gain her trust before you can continue the chat process." In the chat, AI will clearly reflect these settings and personality traits, and different AI characters will basically not have the problem of homogenization.

In addition to the more full character creation, the characters in TipsyChat follow the "storytelling" mode, which provides richer narrative. Both users and AI will play a clear role and be placed in a specific scene, such as "As a boy, I ran into my girlfriend dating someone else", "As a brother, how to regain the trust of his sister after being released from prison", "Reunited with childhood sweethearts after many years", etc. Compared with traditional AI characters, I personally feel that this "small theater" mode is more fun, a bit like an open interactive novel.

Therefore, before starting to chat, TipsyChat users need to read the character introduction in detail to better communicate with AI. After reading the settings, users can press the button to enter the character page to chat. If the user has chatted with the character before, they can continue to chat seamlessly. The previous chat records will be retained, and AI will also remember the previous chat content, and there will be basically no sense of interruption.

Final Thoughts

As the information society matures, individual atomization has become a common phenomenon in different regions and types of modern civilizations around the world.

Against this backdrop, "communication in solitude" has become a tacit way for many netizens to comfort themselves.People are increasingly inclined to establish light, demand-oriented social connections rather than investing a lot of time and energy in cultivating deep emotional ties. This change in social form provides a realistic soil for the rise of AI companions.

Different from using AI big models to empower traditional online social networking, the goal of AI companions is not to promote the connection between users and others, but to directly act as social objects to allow humans to interact with AI.

However, the characteristics of AI companion business make them inevitably involved in ethical and legal issues. If AI companions are modularly loaded into home or personal robots in the future, how to balance individual needs with public morality and legal ethical conflicts will be a problem that developers, regulators and users need to consider together.

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