Doom Scrolling Is Dead, Content Is Liquid With New Character AI Social Feed
'This is the first AI-native feed in the world,' said Karandeep Anand, CEO of Character.AI, in an interview ahead of the launch. 'So far, Character was a one-to-one chat-centric app. Today, we're making it a fully social platform where the line between creator and consumer disappears.'
The Feed showcases a steady stream of creator-made content: short videos, remixable scenes, character cards, and chat snippets. Each can be repurposed or extended with one tap. Anand describes it as a platform where 'doomscrolling is dead,' replaced by remix culture and interactive storytelling. 'When I say social feed, I don't mean another TikTok or Instagram,' he added. 'This is a creative playground where you can jump into a roast battle between Elon and Trump, remix a slice-of-life scene at a café, or co-author a new ending to someone else's story.'
The rollout follows a burst of creator-facing upgrades that include Avatar FX (a proprietary text-to-video tool), scene scripting, character cards, and new sharing formats. Character.AI now supports voice, lip-synced animation, and multimodal storytelling—all generated from text and images within seconds. 'We launched text-to-video before Veo3 came out,' Anand said, referring to Google's latest video model. 'This is our own tech, and it's optimized for speed, cost, and creativity.'
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Character.AI already has a vast creator ecosystem with over three million active builders contributing to a library of more than 100 million characters. Some characters have huge followings. Others are personal, private, or experimental. 'The characters are summoned by people,' Anand explained. 'It's not a one-time creation. Many of our creators make hundreds of updates per month to refine personality, backstory, and lore.'
This creator-driven model sets Character.AI apart from rivals like Meta and Genies. Meta has built influencer-themed AI agents into Messenger and Instagram, pairing celebrity likenesses with scripted chatbot personas. Genies, backed by Bob Iger, is developing persistent AI avatars with interoperable identity across platforms. Neither has cracked the full loop of interaction, creation, and community. 'Everyone is converging on the same goal: merge avatars, agents, and identity,' Anand said. 'We're just doing it from the inside out, starting with emotion and creativity, not branding or utility.'
As AI-generated content becomes more lifelike, safety and moderation become complex, as CharacterAI discovered last year when a forteen year-old user committed suicide with the encouragement of Denarias Targerian, a character from Games of Thrones. Anand said the platform has spent the past year developing strict safeguards: content classifiers, moderation layers, and hard walls between under-18 and adult users. 'We are the only large-scale platform that separates under-18 and over-18 characters,' he said. 'That includes who sees what, who can remix what, and how content is shared. We take it personally. My own six-year-old uses the app.'
Character.ai is free to use and create with, but it offers premium features for $10 a month.
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