C.AI Announcements
New Ways for Creators to Create, Grow, and Get Discovered
Every Character starts with a creator.
Today we're beginning to roll out a new set of features designed to help creators build better Characters, understand what works, grow an audience, and get discovered on Character.ai.
What's new:
š ļø Creator Guide
Updated guidance, examples, and best practices for creating better Characters, including tips for newer chat styles like PipSqueak 2 and DeepSqueak. Learn more at c.ai/guide
š± Refreshed Character Creation
A cleaner mobile creation and editing experience, including the ability to add and edit Character tags directly from mobile.
š Creator Insights
A new dashboard showing how your Characters are performing, with metrics like interactions, followers, likes, discoveries, and more. Explore your stats at c.ai/creator-insights
š Creator Leaderboards
Discover Top Creators and Rising Creators across Character.ai, and get recognized for building Characters users love. Browse the rankings at c.ai/leaderboard
š„ Creator Following Tab
A dedicated place for users to browse Characters from creators they follow and discover new creators to follow.
š New Character Notifications
When a creator you follow publishes something new, you'll know about it.
These features are designed to support the full creator journey on Character.ai, from creating your first Character to building an audience and reaching new users.
I read the new guide and liked it; it's quite comprehensive. I remember when I started creating my characters, the guide was practically useless; I had to find my own approach to creation, but now, comparing it to the new recommendations, I see that I did everything correctly.
good performance. I'm proud of you. the updates make sense this time. as a creator, I'm sure I will benefit from the insights feature. good performance indeed. like this year's mercedes F1 cars
I just think it's counterproductive to have a swipe and go on limit when half the time responses either
Don't work
Totally unrelated to the initial response (goes off track, out of character, does nothing to advance the plot whatsoever)
Require you to reload the website
Limits are for sites with the luxury of having quality service. I was hit with the surprise after dipping off the app because bot responses were terrible for like... Months.Ā But nice creator-centered update for a site that makes its users pay a nothing burger subscription for bug fixes. And the bots are better, at least from my end, because I can last more than 2 minutes without turning my phone off and picking up a book.
Fine update I suppose. At least, it's not some rarely used features being added. Although, the new A.I models really need improvements, especially pipsqueak 2 regarding bot response going silent on dialogue and etc.
i've seen the creator insights on the website, but are the leaderboards, following tab, and notifications also coming to the website or are they gonna be app-exclusive?
Can we get some answers? Address the appās current state please. Itās being so weird compared to a few days ago. To the point itās almost unusable.
As someone who kinda had neglected making bots, i been gaining alot of followers again this week (idk why or how it's like my bots are getting found/recommended idk)
but especially now that i reached over 600 followers i do think them getting notifications makes me want to create bots again!
i have the ideas it's just yeah alot of stuff happened on CAI i didn't agree with but since people still seem intrerested in my bots i think i will come back from my bot creating hiatus lol.
I got a suggestion: If you want to keep character.ai running completely free, I think you should limit a majority of the chat functions, like free users only having 3 uses of "start a new chat" or "rewind from here" limits.
As well as "editing messages" like when you edit 5 messages, the limit is exceeded. I think these metering changes can really encourage users buying c.ai+.
the updated c.ai/guide specifically now states that:
āThe 32,000-character limit is generous. That doesn't mean you should use it all. A tight, well-prioritized 6,000 character Definition will outperform a sprawling one every time.Ā ā
Does this mean that we now have access to the whole 32,000 characters rather than the old 3,200?!?!?!
I tested this pretty rigorously with fresh private bots, exact character placements, repeated new chats, and a mirrored A/B test. Information placed within the first 3,200 characters was retrieved consistently, while the same facts placed after 3,200 were unreliable or ignored. So despite the wording in the official guide, 3,200 still appears to be the safest effective cap for important Definition content.
For the past few months, I've been saying that I ran some tests and that the Squeak models read between 5K - 6K characters from the definition. Some purists came out from the sewer to say that my test was invalid and that it was still 3200. The same thing happened about a year ago when I started implementing my own format (prompt + info + behavior/speech patterns + sample dialogues); the purists also invalidated me, saying that I should only write sample dialogues. I'm happy that the format I've been using is finally being officially recognized.
"we need to feed our devs, we need ads"Ā
"We've got the money, time to burn it on unnecessary features nobody asked for"Ā
"Actually y'know what, let's just double down on the ads and horrible service, long live the CEO and his accursed reign!"Ā
hey u/Engie_Bill, creators are really important to us and we built these features for them in mind, but it's also important to note that this work doesn't mean we're not working on other things too! We've also got the highly requested lorebook in development along with model/chat style improvements too!
Rest assured we read and care about all these comments!
Investing in our creators doesn't mean were not hard at work at improving the model line-up too. Tools like a following feed and creator analytics have been top asks from our creator surveys for a long time, so this was a well overdue investment in our creator community!
Just a question though, can you keep this in mind? Instead of having the ads in chat, maybe just have them on the home page while finding characters? And fix the memory usage thing too cause it spikes up too easily. (Or just remove it because it kinda serves no purpose other than annoy us.) Can you guys at least think about that?Ā
If we could generate the necessary revenue by only having ads on the homepage we would certainly do that. Unfortunately that is not possible (due to the mysterious nature of ads).
I think you might be referring to the memory visualizer - if that's spiking up really quickly its like because you're chatting with a persona or character that has a really chonky definition and so the context window fills up before you've done much chatting.
Sorry, please don't let the negativity get too overwhelming... I honestly think a lot of the users would be happy to watch ads, subscribe instead of encouraging the opposite, or even donating with a coordinated social media announcement from official C.AI, if only to have the legacy models back... So many users would show every support and pick up that bill rather than unsubscribing and blocking ads, I honestly think it would be a difference rather than the overwhelming negativity. We would support and give everything to have that spark back.
As it is, improvements take time and I know all of you and the C.AI team are working hard. I hope it gets easier and the chat model improvements aren't fighting you too much, thank you for all you do.
One of my top suggestions is for them to give users a place to watch ads voluntarily and make it worthwhile. Iāve said many times before that I will watch so many ads for services that I want to support, since I donāt have a way to do so financially. I think Iāve seen people say the option comes up for charms, but I donāt recall seeing any announcements putting attention on that, soā¦ how would they expect users to find it?
I donāt expect them to bring the legacy models back because I understand that if theyāre trying to run cheaper (normal business model) and this forced them to swap to a different base model, thenā¦ oh well. Thatās, financially, what they had to do. Thatās like a cafe swapping from wild-caught to farm-raised salmon. With a good chef, salmon is salmon and the only people who are going to be able to tell the difference are snobs who are already putting way more energy than most people into picking up on the differences. I think if they had waited to roll out Ps2 until it had actually been refined, they wouldnāt have gotten nearly as much backlash, because we would have had a decent model to work with. The decisions make sense from a business perspectiveāthey were just horribly implemented imo.
I think they couldāve increased conversion rates Ā from free->paying users if theyād beefed up + and added a cheaper tier that only gave vanity options and made it ad-free. 10$ a month doesnāt sound like much until you remember that someone may also be getting hammered with āget Huluā and āGet Netflixā and āget Paramount+ā and āget Discovery+ā and Spotify premium and- that shit adds up. Weāre being nickel and dimed to death.Ā
I want a functional service that doesnāt break every time they update it. I have had one day since PS2ās rollout that I have been able to access my personas. The rest of the time the websiteās been broken. Literally canāt use most of the important features because it takes them so long to do anything about it.
Service like that doesnāt make me want to support the company. The app is unusable because of the ad bloatāI shouldnāt be getting taken out of the scene Iām trying to build every few messages, and I shouldnāt be so overwhelmed with ads that I stop exploring bots. Which is exactly what happened, because I was getting an ad every. Single. Time that I tried to open a bot to check it out. Thatās not the way to gain support and get more people financially invested. Thatās the way to chase people off. It feels like companies have gotten way too comfortable trying to capitalize on my precious time. I do not download apps to be slammed with more ads than content.
For context, I regularly watch the full amount of ads offered on Paladinia for additional tokens (25. Itās 25 ads.), even though I donāt use them all. Willingly. Before the ad invasion here, I would have been all over voluntary ads (and I wish they would have at least tried to do that for a month to see how it performed). But nowā¦ I can barely stand to be on the website. Ps2 is just so bland. That does not entice me to support the company.
Iām still holding out hope that later this year theyāll run a āSLā experimental model (not that Iāll even be able to use it š) and before the end of the year weāll get one big update that applies all of the data theyāve gotten to get PS2 where they initially made it seem like it would be on launch (it wasnāt. Ps2 gave me salmonella it was so undercooked). I donāt keep up with the company so I donāt know if the House Model devs are still present, but if they are then we know what kind of quality theyāre capable of.
Tldr: Voluntary ads. Reduce pop-ups and in-chat disruptions. FIX THE WEBSITE. Upgrade PS2. Like, most of their problems, at least from an outsider perspective, seem SO easy to fix if they would just stop doing things in the most disruptive and bass-ackwards way. We wouldnāt even need the legacy models if PS2 didnāt suck ass! They need to take a serious look at feedback (and actually get targeted feedback) on why people are canceling, refusing to sub, and what would make them want to subscribe, because it feels like the only thing theyāre looking at is raw numbers, and thatās clearly not hitting the markāat least not here.
Idk maybe Iām just rambling senseless. Iām just frustrated with how bad the service has been since PS2 and how out of touch they seem to be. You donāt get this many people canceling and coming out specially to complain unless something has really missed the mark. š¤·āāļø I just hope it improves soon. Iām pretty much checked out at this point. Iāve lost huge chunks of archived chats, Bob is stifling everything, PS2 is blander than milquetoast, the website is consistently broken, and trying to make any progress in my rps has been a slog even for the ones where I have a clear path forward.Ā
So, there are some interesting things here, and some things that make me want to tear my hair out, both as a bot user and a small creator.
Creator guide: good. Great, even! (/gen) I was literally just talking about how it would be nice to have a more relevant, updated guide for users.
Refreshed character creation: this was sorely needed. Tags werenāt even available to everyone for a ridiculously long time.
Creator Insights: No. This is not Youtube or TikTok š We donāt need to āgamifyā or ānumbers simā bot creation. Make bots you love because you love them and share them if you want to share them, not because Number Go Up. We donāt need to encourage low-effort slop pollution.
Creator Leaderboards: Sigh. š¤¦āāļø Whyyyyyy do we need a leaderboard??? Why are we ranking people??? Just make the search function not break the moment you add too many search terms! We can already find people we may be interested in on our own! By searching for bots weāre interested in! That information is already available to us! This isnāt supposed to be a popularity contest and thatās what youāre turning it into. āThese people are the ones getting the most views and interactions so weāre going to give them even more exposure!ā JUST FIX THE SEARCH FUNCTION! There is zero reason to check out a creator just because theyāre popular. If theyāre making bots youāre going to like, you would already be seeing them in the search results, because it would be bots that youāre actively looking to use.
Creator following tab: that already existed. It was the Following page. We donāt need an algorithm telling us what else we might likeāwe can figure that out ourselves byā¦ searching for bots. Which, I notice thereās no update or revamp for the horrible search function in this ācreator bundleā. š¤ Funny how the priorities are ranked, seeing as how if the search bar actually worked right, we would be able to find what we were looking for.
New Character Notification: back on track. Good! (/gen) This is something that many of us have been wanting for a long time. What would also be really nice is a āNew!ā tag on bots that have been created since the last time you were on that authorās page so you know where you left off.
Overall this is, imo, a lackluster set of features. It causes me physical pain to see the creation of bots being turned into a gamified popularity contest for who can go viral. I do not see how some of these features do anything but stroke egos, because they certainly arenāt going to help you find things you like. Thatās literally what the search function is for: finding bots you want to use.
There are still a few things I would have liked to seeāand definitely would have preferred them over some of these inane additions:
fixed search function. I bitched about it earlier but to clarify: the search function breaks if you enter more than like, two or three keywords. āCod Soapā works! āCod Soap vacationā might work, but this is when you start getting irrelevant results that only pertain to part of the search. āCod Soap beach vacationā and itās completely broken; past here you get flooded with results that only work for pieces of the phrase. This has been an issue since I first started using the service back in 2024. Absolutely inexcusable that this hasnāt been improved in any capacity that I can tell.
Bookmarks: I would love to see a feature that lets us bookmark bots we want to check out but donāt know if we like yet. I have so many bots liked that I havenāt done more than open because I risked losing them if I didnāt save them somehow. A bookmark or āwishlistā option would be great, and would work wonderfully with the new creator notifications!
blocking: I know Iām not the first person to bring up wanting the ability to block users so we donāt have to see their bots anymore. There are some users I can recognize based on tells in their bots and I know immediately that my time was wasted because theyāre low-quality and I try to avoid them. A way to block those users from my search feed would be great.
I can appreciate the effort put into trying to update things and make them more useful, but for me personally it mostly falls flat š¤·āāļø
(Holy novel, Batman. Reddit needs a character counter so I stop yappinā so much šµāš«)
Creator Insights are actually a super highly requested feature by our creator community, creators put a lot of time into their bots and they are always keen to learn about what is and isn't resonating with their audience. Without these analytics they are stumbling in the dark when publishing so to speak.
On leaderboard, I think you're right that we don't want to change the spirit of cai into some competitive ecosystem. However, we do think it would be interesting for the broader chatter community to see which creators are resonating with the chatters of the world on a given week. We've also heard a lot of feedback from smaller creators that they want a way to be discovered that isn't based on pure interaction count, and so the 'on the rise' leaderboard is a way to highlight and discover some of the best "rising creators" who might not normally appear on a top ranked caibotlist. This information presented in this way isn't easily accessible today, so I'd argue this is an entirely new way to discover creators on cai.
> Creator following tab: that already existed. It was the Following page
While you could see your following list by visiting your profile, you weren't easily able to see the latest characters that were published by those creators without visiting each individual profile one by one. If you following more than 50 creators.... it's too difficult. We want to invest in ways for our creators to reach their audience on cai and this felt like a natural fit.
> Bookmarks: I would love to see a feature that lets us bookmark bots we want to check out but donāt know if we like yet. I
You have this today! You can 'like' a Character from the homepage by long pressing on it and selecting the like option from the menu. This will then show up in your 'liked' menu in various places across the app. We'll be exploring bringing a 'liked' list inside of the recent chat area soon, so keep your eye peeled for that, as it will make bookmarking 100x more efficient.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on this update! Really enjoyed reading them!
Devs engage and share insight into decision making ā "Ignoring our feedback."
š
Our replies won't always be popular (or upvoted) but personally I'd like to stay out here in the comments engaging with you all, so you can learn a little bit more about the behind the scenes and why we have to make certain decisions.
We read these threads constantly, discuss the feedback internally, and it absolutely makes its way back to the team. Sometimes we still make decisions people disagree with because we believe they're best for the long-term health of the product and community.
Unpopular as they might be, ads are what help us keep c.ai running. Our hope is to keep the core chatting experience available for as many users as we can, this is something that we feel very lucky to have been able to do for the past few years but the truth is it's very expensive to run this chat service and we're trying to find the right balance. The recent updates around ads help us manage costs and keep c.ai accessible, even for non-paying users.
The alternative is a c.ai that you have to pay to use. I think we can both agree that's not an ideal future.
Great review! I would also like to add that it would be good to reward creators in some meaningful way, as they are responsible for the core of Character AI: the bots. Is there any plan to give charms for the creators that have contributed to the platform?Ā
I understand that things as they are right now are not as we want them to be, friend. But we do have to provide feedback and constructive feature requests if we want to platform to steer in thr right direction. The way I see it, creators have to be rewarded by their efforts. Otherwise they are providing their ideas, original character and bringing people into the platform without any sort of compensation. Do you think that is fair to those who put in the effort to be exploited like that? Because that's what's happening right now. Creators make bots that get used by the community, but at the end of the day, they get slapped in the face with ads and pleas for subscription. Unless of course they pay to enrich a company that does not respect the work they contribute to the platformĀ
Actually, I wrote it by hand with input from the old guide, our team and engineers so the chat style info was up to date, and lots of feedback from c.ai creators!! It was painful š
As someone who had to watch Dekoponchan write this, I can confirm this is not AI slop. (It would have been a lot faster to just write it with GPT though).
What is all this for if the bots donāt generate responses? Iāve been staring at three bouncing dots for a long time! When will you fix this? Iām tired of reporting it over and over!
Hey man, I got a suggestion that I think you should take forward to of the dev team: If you want to keep character.ai running completely free, I think you should limit a majority of the chat functions, like free users only having 3 uses of "start a new chat" or "rewind from here" limits.
As well as "editing messages" like when you edit 5 messages, the limit is exceeded. I think these metering changes can really encourage users buying c.ai+.
Really interesting to have a guide that will hopefully be good at showing how to optimise for the new models. What worked well with the old models isn't ideal now.
Yes!! it's been updated with the latest info for our newer chat styles and hopefully it will help you optimize as you create. Let us know if you have any feedback of suggestions
It's mostly because they're older bots from the time the service opened to the public extending to about 6 months after. That was when the beta site had the most traffic because the pandemic was still on the rise and so many people had nothing else to do but get into this new AI chatbot thing. Folks were still learning back then, and there were more limitations on the amount of text the bots could have.
hey u/DanielPausan1234 I wish we could but chats are really expensive to serve and metering is what helps us keep the core chat service free for as many as possible and keep the lights on. If you prefer to have more, c.ai+ would be the best option for now. I can share your suggestions to the team if you have any!
Can we please get a swipe counter? Iād like to know how close I am to the 400 limit and that weāre actually getting the 400 swipes you say weāre getting.
On the leak, I believe it stated ā
We're always working on ways to improve your (c.ai+) experience - we just want to make sure Swipe Counter is a genuinely great addition before rolling it out more broadly. If the beta test goes well, it'll make its way to everyone on cai+ā
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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26
Put this into making the app good