The fraught chatbot company is entering the crowded world of vertical videos — with an AI twist.

Character.ai, the popular and controversial chatbot company founded by former Google engineers, is expanding its business in a surprising way: the launch of a microdrama division.

The firm will announce Thursday that it has created a number of AI-driven animated microdramas for its app, hiring Hollywood writers to pen the episodes, which are then generated with artificial intelligence rather than traditional animated techniques. AI is also deployed after the series’ are produced to enable users to chat with characters and even engage in their own fan-fiction-style chatbot creations based on them.

A representative for Character.ai declined to provide the names of those working on the vertical-video series’ but said the company had hired writers and artists with past credits on projects at Nickelodeon, Netflix, DreamWorks and Blumhouse. (Many Hollywood creatives are of course reluctant to come forth with an admission of AI-related employment.)

Three series are dropping at launch. They include Last Summer, about a young woman trying to figure out the identity of her summer crush; The Nighttime Game, in which a group of twentysomethings gather for a deadly game in a possibly haunted house; and Edenfall, a kind of Hunger Games-meets-Ready Player One tale set amid a group “beta-testing” a new MMORPG. In the episodes made available to journalists, that last show proved the most compelling, with the slickest concept and most convincing animation.

Microdramas — the pulpy youth-oriented fictional series that have become blazingly hot in the past year — monetize their audience by selling further episodes and premium subscriptions. Character.ai, also known as c.ai, believes that it can generate added revenue streams with the chatbot engagement and the fan-fiction elements. (The possibility of entering an episode for direct roleplay is technologically at least a year away, CEO Karandeep Anand told The Hollywood Reporter.)

The Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/character-ai-subscribers-app-microdramas-1236642929/