But in the past year, new AI tools backed by tech industry giants have helped inspire a rush of competitors. One of the earliest examples, Replika, founded by former journalist Eugenia Kuyda, has let users chat-and flirt-with AI companions since 2016. The content on Chub is often disturbing, but academics and child sexual abuse experts say it is novel enough that it is difficult to categorize, both legally and ethically.Įrotic chatbots aren’t new. And when asked how he felt about creating a website whose community seems to relish child pornographic role play, the Chub founder responded: “Disappointed, but unsurprised.” “They’ve been going through the same thing that chatbots are going through, except for decades,” he said. When asked about potential legal liability, Lore told Fortune that he thinks his website is akin to Archive of Our Own, a repository of fan fiction that has been operational for more than 15 years. Still, Fortune found that these cartoons were often sexually explicit-in cases of both child and adult characters. The founder says he doesn’t moderate the user-submitted prompts that drive the role play, though he claims to “heavily” moderate the images used to advertise the various bots. Though it features thousands of characters, the most popular scenarios on Chub involve text-based child pornography. “If someone is doing something in the privacy of their own home with a computer that’s acting out fantasies … it’s going to be hard to impose liability.” Kevin Werbach, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School “Llama being released open-source essentially turned it into a gold-rush-type of scenario.” “Character.AI let the genie out of the bottle in terms of showing how much this could take off,” Lore told Fortune. Chub charges fees starting at $5 a month to use the new chatbots, and the founder says the site has now generated more than $1 million in annualized revenue. But in July it launched its own chat service built with Meta’s new open-source large language model Llama 2, which, like OpenAI’s GPT models, draws on a massive set of textual data to offer humanlike responses. These include Olivia, a 13-year-old anime girl with pigtails in a hospital gown, or scantily clad Reiko, “your clumsy older sister,” who is “constantly having sexual accidents with her younger brother.” In these chats, no images are generated-only text.Ĭhub didn’t make much money in the months after its launch in March when its service was limited to a platform where users could upload AI scenarios and try those supplied by others. Users can peruse a catalog of user-generated character cards that feature images-usually in the style of anime-and short descriptions of role-play scenarios. The founder of Chub AI, who goes by Lore, told Fortune Character.AI’s policy not to “allow certain things” spurred him to create his own site.Ĭhub, short for Character Hub, is essentially an uncensored clone of Character.AI. The company, which is reportedly raising funds at a $5 billion valuation, soon cracked down on chats about racier topics. In September 2022, a website called Character.AI went live, enabling users to talk to AI versions of characters like Elon Musk, Napoléon Bonaparte, and Socrates. ![]() More broadly, all of this raises hard questions about where to draw legal and ethical lines between dark fantasies and criminal exploitation-and about whether tech companies should be held accountable for what emerges from uncensored AI. Experts warn all of these activities may give rise to real-world danger for minors, though some say AI child porn may provide a less harmful outlet for pedophiles. The illicit scenarios described above revolve around text, but it may be only a matter of time until services pair the chats with AI-created images of children, which are already spreading. They are part of a broader uncensored AI economy that, according to Fortune’s interviews with 18 AI developers and founders, was spurred first by OpenAI and then accelerated by Meta’s release of its open-source Llama tool. ![]() ![]() The brothel, advertised by illustrated girls in spaghetti strap dresses and barrettes, promises a chat-based “world without feminism” where “girls offer sexual services.” Chub AI offers more than 500 such scenarios, and a growing number of other sites are enabling similar AI-powered child pornographic role-play.
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