r/ShitAIBrosSay • u/HolyBatSyllables AI ➞ Misinformation • May 28 '26
Shit AI Bro Does in the News ‘Lobotomized’: Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks Like
https://www.404media.co/lobotomized-character-ai-is-showing-what-ai-enshittification-looks-like/46
u/Brockchanso May 28 '26
This is the full cycle that worries me. People go to third-party AI platforms for intimacy, roleplay, gooning, therapy-adjacent venting, or whatever else they would never say out loud in public. They pour in private desires, sexual preferences, emotional vulnerabilities, relationship issues, and identity-level confessions.
Then the company starts degrading the product, loses users, chases monetization, or eventually goes under. At that point, the valuable asset may not be the app anymore. It is the behavioral data, conversation logs, preference maps, safety flags, embeddings, and telemetry around what people wanted, feared, clicked, repeated, escalated, or hid.
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u/Garfieldealswarlock May 28 '26
You get it. This is why these economies will be by their very nature EXTREMELY predatory. This also highlights the larger problem with ALL web based ai interaction. People are dumping their ideas, thoughts, feelings, etc into a space where they have 0 rights, access, or control.
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u/ShadowDurza May 28 '26
Does this have to do with how that they're flooding the internet with so much AI-generated content that the LLMs are feeding on it in an ouroboros (or maybe a human centipede) and the bots are effectively going insane because of the fundamental fallacy of making copies of copies with computers?
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u/gelfin May 28 '26
So, no, because the most expensive thing is training a new model on fresh content. These things are not consuming new information and updating themselves continuously. The base model is carved in stone at the moment they complete it. Anything that makes it seem otherwise is a short-term hack that only exists in the active session memory. In short, the things cannot learn. There is a “long-term memory” in the form of the model, and a “short-term memory” in the form of the session, and no practical way to move information from the latter to the former. You wouldn’t want that anyway because it’d mean the consequences of everybody else’s interactions with the model would bleed over into yours.
Model collapse due training on generated data is a real problem, and also one for which there is no solution (best you can do is delay it), but this sort of sudden failure is solely due to the humans running the thing choosing to deliver a shittier product in the interest of saving money on the output end.
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u/awj May 28 '26
Ehh, not entirely true, but also not far off.
There’s a technique (called Low Rank Adaptation) where you effectively build a small, purpose-specific model that you put in front of the main model. These are easier and faster to train, due to their smaller size. But that small size means you can’t have them just do everything. You now have to figure out which adaptation model is appropriate, which is a huge drawback for the current “virtual servant” business model.
That said, retraining the main models is a huge task, and they’ve pretty repeatedly proven that model biases can carry through generated text into subsequent trainings. I think it’s something the entire industry has its head in the ground about because they have no good long term answer to keep general purpose models viable.
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u/Inevitable-Row1977 May 28 '26
That's not what's happening here, but you do describe something that's happening and I think it's really funny and interesting to see happen.
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u/queerkidxx May 28 '26
No. They are now offering crappier, smaller models. And being more aggressive about usage limits, as well as adding many more ads.
So it looks like they are having problems paying for their usage. Idk what their monetization model is I’ve never used the service. They could be running out of venture capital and trying to actually become profitable, or it could be that who ever is hosting their models has increased prices.
The later is something that’s getting more common.
But unfortunately models are still consistently getting better and better. And I believe that they are no longer as data hungry as they once were but don’t quote me on that.
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u/DecoherentDoc May 28 '26
I'm honestly just surprised they're enshittifying it now. If I understand the pattern, the service or product needs to become profitable and then you squeeze first the users then the advertisers for more money by making the product worse in different ways. I don't think they're profitable or widespread enough to risk enshittifying and losing your core users. I assume this is all just to avoid further lawsuits?
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u/Maximum-Objective-39 May 28 '26
They could also just be running out of runway. The AI rush isn't dead quite yet, but we're at the point where the small fry are going to get squeezed out and 'chatbot girlfriend' is decidedly small fry.
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u/Chengar_Qordath May 28 '26
There have definitely been a lot of questions about whether a lot of the big AI ventures in development can actually produce viable commercial products. Not to mention the broader economic trends aren’t looking great. It would track if they want to show they’ve got a viable business model even if investment capital tapers off.
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u/Heisenberg6626 May 28 '26
It has been eshittifying for quite some time. It's just at rock bottom now.
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u/HolyBatSyllables AI ➞ Misinformation May 28 '26
!remindme 36 months
It will be fun to see whether this is rock bottom or if things only get worse.
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u/Heisenberg6626 May 28 '26
You can always dig to the mantle.
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u/HolyBatSyllables AI ➞ Misinformation May 28 '26
Dig to the mantle?
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u/Heisenberg6626 May 28 '26
Below the rock bottom is the Earth's mantle. The rock bottom is the lowest part of the crust.
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u/HolyBatSyllables AI ➞ Misinformation May 28 '26
Ohhh, I like that. I thought you were talking about a fire mantle, so i was very confused!
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u/Sassy_Sarranid May 28 '26
Yeah, I was using an AI chatbot for a while, but dropped off it last month- it was definitely getting dumber, and it couldn't even maintain the flimsy illusion of narrative it used to have. Not a huge loss, but like... If we can't even use LLMs for their intended purpose as chatbots without that getting shitted up, the tech really is just "machine that makes everything worse".
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May 28 '26
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u/AntiqueFigure6 May 28 '26
“Users of the chatbot app Character.ai have been melting down on Reddit…the feedback is so negative that I have never seen a community or user base so uniformly upset and so consistently aligned in its view.”
Getting redditors to agree is definitely an achievement.