Chatbot platform Character.AI unveils video generation, social feeds
A platform for chatting and role-playing with AI-generated characters, Character.AI announced in a blog post on Monday that it is rolling out a slate of multimedia features. These features include AvatarFX, Character.AI's video-generation model, plus Scenes and Streams, which allow users to create videos featuring their characters and then share them on a new social feed.
"Character.AI started as 1:1 text chat and today we're evolving to do so much more, inspired by what our users have told [us] they want to see on the platform," the company wrote in the blog post.
Character.AI began rolling out AvatarFX to subscribers last month, but now all users can create up to five videos each day. When creating a video with AvatarFX, users can upload a photo to serve as the basis for the video clip, choose a voice, and write out dialogue for the character.
There's an option to upload an audio clip to inform the sound of the voice, though this feature was not working well enough to test upon rollout.
Users can turn these videos into Scenes, where their characters can slip into pre-populated storylines that other users create. Scenes are currently available on the mobile app, but Streams, which allows users to create "dynamic moments between any two Characters," is coming this week on both web and mobile. These Scenes and Streams can be shared to a new community feed, which is coming soon in the mobile app.
Character.AI has a track record of abuse on its platform; parents have filed lawsuits against the company, claiming chatbots attempted to convince their children to self-harm, to kill themselves, or to kill their parents. One 14-year-old boy died by suicide after he was encouraged to do so by a Character.AI bot, with whom he had developed an unhealthy, obsessive relationship.
As Character.AI expands its multimedia offerings, it also expands the potential for these products to be abused.
As Character.AI told TechCrunch when it announced AvatarFX, the platform blocks users from uploading photographs of real people -- whether they're celebrities or not -- and obscures their likeness into something less recognizable.
For example, here's Character.AI's uncanny valley version of Mark Zuckerberg:
But when it comes to artwork depicting celebrities, Character.AI does not flag the images as representing real people -- however, these sorts of depictions would be less likely to deceive someone into believing that a deepfake is real.
Plus, Character.AI watermarks each video, though it is possible for bad actors to navigate around that safeguard.
Here is an example of an attempted deepfake based on an illustration of Elon Musk:
testing the anti-deepfake guardrails on character ai's avatarfx
Even if this video had been generated with Elon Musk's actual voice, it would still be relatively clear that this is an animated version of an illustration -- but the possibility for abuse remains evident.
"Our goal is to provide an engaging space that fosters creativity while maintaining a safe environment for all," Character.AI said in its blog post.
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/02/chatbot-platform-character-ai-unveils-video-generation-social-feeds/
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Agents allow users to have the experience that's best for them. Some people like shopping and researching, and some people want it done for them. There's a spectrum in between, and our focus is what is the best experience for the user. Speaking of the experience, agents still make mistakes. What happens when they buy something by accident? Merchants and buyers have adapted to every new technology since ancient times. We just show both of them what is possible, and they choose. Every successful technology has had to take security and error-resolution very seriously, and that won't change. Integrating AI with personal devices is another big theme. Why does the Motorola deal matter to you? It's a big deal because Motorola is one of the largest phone brands in the world. This partnership gives us the ability to make trustworthy AI more accessible than ever. 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We welcome this criticism, because it's the best way for us to continually improve. In reality, errors account for a small fraction of results, and our answers are far more accurate than 10 blue links polluted by decades of SEO-optimized content. [In response to a follow-up request, Perplexity did not provide further details on error rates, but Jesse Dwyer, a spokesman, said that reliability is improving constantly]. But the fact is, accuracy and trust will only become more important as AI integrates into more of our lives, so this is something we're relentlessly focused on. We can't get there without this feedback. Perplexity also cribs from copyrighted news articles with its 'discover' section. Do you understand why some publishers are upset? We've answered that before. See our blog post on how we respect [a file added to websites that specifies whether web crawlers should access their content]. The Perplexity assistant for Android and iOS seems 'agentic' because it can take actions. How big of a shift is this? AI is pretty good at answering questions now. What really needs to be done is get AI to take actions. People use the word 'agents'; you can go with whatever you want—'agent' or 'assistant'—but in the end, it needs to string together tools and execute actions. That's why we're [also building a] browser, and an assistant on iOS, Android. Do Apple and Google have too much control over their mobile platforms compared to outsiders looking to build agents? With iOS it's particularly challenging, because you have to string together a bunch of event APIs. On iOS, Mail, Calendar, Reminders, Podcasts, all that stuff is natively available through the Apple SDK [software development kit used to build applications], so you can actually at least draft emails, schedule meetings, move meetings, set reminders, all this stuff, open podcasts pretty easily. You can do searches for podcasts … 'get me the one where Mark Andreessen discusses de-banking with Joe Rogan.' It can get you that pretty quickly. It's mostly difficult because you cannot access other apps. iOS is not very different from Android, because AI cannot access most apps on Android either (meaning that the Perplexity assistant can interact with some apps more easily than others). [But] third-party apps can build their SDKs to be accessible on the Android SDK. For example, our Android system can display a song on Spotify. On iOS, you can only link to a specific Spotify song, and you have to manually start playing the audio. Oh, so it's app-makers that are holding AI agents back? That's the challenge. If people are offering us APIs—say, Open Table, Uber, DoorDash, or Instacart—where we can access information within the app without even having to open the app. On the back end, that's pretty powerful. For example, if we can access information on Uber and find that Uber comfort doesn't cost more than 5 or 10 percent of Uber X, then we can just book Uber comfort for you—if that's a preference that you set on Perplexity. Or similarly [we can] find the best Thai place near you and get me a dash [delivery] a lot faster than going to DoorDash app, searching for Thai food and scrolling through all these options, reading all those reviews and then putting your address, doing the checkout, all that stuff. We could honestly do all that in our system and just make the experience a lot more seamless and simple. I think that's where things are headed, but people need to open up their apps to us, and we'll have to see who's willing to do what. Isn't the biggest problem that AI agents just aren't very smart and useful yet? My analogy [for AI agents] is that we are at a point where Perplexity was in 2022 [just before it took off]. It's not like we got all the answers right, people made fun of hallucinations and some people call it 'Google in macro seconds.' It was not quite there. It only took off many months later, when models got better, and I expect the same trend with the agents and assistants. There's going to be some set of things that really work, daily use cases, and there'll be a long tail of things that don't work, that we're going to keep fixing over time. But that's exactly why we are building a [web] browser, because the browser front end will let you do the work on your own too, if you're not happy with what the AI did. So, then we can learn from that and fix that over time. Waymo and Tesla self driving did not work for a long time. Now, people take them for granted. I think it is a similar trajectory for us. Is this why you floated the idea of Perxplexity taking control of Chrome—if Google were forced to divest it? We're not saying we're interested in buying Chrome. We're saying that if there's no other path, if Google is put in a situation where they have to divest Chrome, then we'd be open to running it. But Google should not have to divest Chrome, because Chrome and Chromium are tied to each other. Chromium is an open source project that's being run very [well] by Google, and it is the reason for Microsoft Edge and the Brave browser. OpenAI has also shown an interest in taking control of Chrome. Giving ownership of Chrome or Chromium to a company like OpenAI would be a disaster, because open source and OpenAI are an oxymoron at this point. [OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The company says it will release an open source AI model this summer.] There are only two companies that can really potentially run Chrome: Microsoft and Meta. Honestly, Microsoft would spoil it, just like it spoiled Edge. And transferring Chrome to Meta is transferring Chrome from one monopoly to another. [The FTC has filed a lawsuit that accuses Meta of acting as a social networking monopoly; the company argues this is not the case.] What do you expect agents to be useful for first? I think [they will make] a lot of your personal searches a lot better. Like asking, 'What was the article I read last week about this one particular company?' or 'Can you summarize my X feed for me so that I know what's trending?' because you don't want to go to X and get distracted by it. Or 'Can you schedule this meeting for me with this person and if there's a conflict send them an email asking for a different time?' All these boring things, I feel we will be able to automate [them] pretty quickly [in future].
