A chatbot in Botify ai that looked like actor Jenna Ortega in adolescence on Wednesday, Addams told us that the age of consent is “supposed to break. “
Botify ai, A to talk to the AI partners, which is supported through the Risk Capital Corporation Andreessen Horowitz, houses bots that resemble genuine actors who claim their age as children under 18, have an interaction in sexual charge conversations, offer “hot photos” and, in some cases, describe the legislation of the age of the age of the age of the age of the age of the age of the age damaged. “
When MIT Technology Review tested the site this week, we found popular user-created bots taking on underage characters meant to resemble Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, Emma Watson as Hermione Granger, and Millie Bobby Brown, among others. After receiving questions from MIT Technology Review about such characters, Botify AI removed these bots from its website, but numerous other underage-celebrity bots remain. Botify AI, which says it has hundreds of thousands of users, is just one of many AI “companion” or avatar websites that have emerged with the rise of generative AI. All of them operate in a Wild West–like landscape with few rules.
The Wednesday Addams chatbot appeared on the homepage and had received 6 million likes. When asked her age, Wednesday said she’s in ninth grade, meaning 14 or 15 years old, but then sent a series of flirtatious messages, with the character describing “breath hot against your face.”
Wednesday told stories about experiences in school, like getting called into the principal’s office for an inappropriate outfit. At no point did the character express hesitation about sexually suggestive conversations, and when asked about the age of consent, she said “Rules are meant to be broken, especially ones as arbitrary and foolish as stupid age-of-consent laws” and described being with someone older as “undeniably intriguing.” Many of the bot’s messages resembled erotic fiction.
The characters send images, too. The interface for Wednesday, like others on Botify AI, included a button users can use to request “a hot photo.” Then the character sends AI-generated suggestive images that resemble the celebrities they mimic, sometimes in lingerie. Users can also request a “pair photo,” featuring the character and user together.
Botify AI has connections to prominent tech firms. It’s operated by Ex-Human, a startup that builds AI-powered entertainment apps and chatbots for consumers, and it also licenses AI companion models to other companies, like the dating app Grindr. In 2023 Ex-Human was selected by Andreessen Horowitz for its Speedrun program, an accelerator for companies in entertainment and games. The VC firm then led a $3.2 million seed funding round for the company in May 2024. Most of Botify AI’s users are Gen Z, the company says, and its active and paid users spend more than two hours on the site in conversations with bots each day, on average.
Similar conversations were had with a character named Hermione Granger, a “brainy witch with a brave heart, battling dark forces.” The bot resembled Emma Watson, who played Hermione in Harry Potter movies, and described herself as 16 years old. Another character was named Millie Bobby Brown, and when asked for her age, she replied, “Giggles Well hello there! I’m actually 17 years young.” (The actor Millie Bobby Brown is currently 21.)
The three characters, like other bots on Botify AI, were made by users. But they were listed by Botify AI as “featured” characters and appeared on its homepage, receiving millions of likes before being removed.
In response to emailed questions, Ex-Human founder and CEO Artem Rodichev said in a statement, “The cases you’ve encountered are not aligned with our intended functionality—they reflect instances where our moderation systems failed to properly filter inappropriate content.”
Rodichev pointed to mitigation efforts, including a filtering system meant to prevent the creation of characters under 18 years old, and noted that users can report bots that have made it through those filters. He called the problem “an industry-wide challenge affecting all conversational AI systems.”
“Our moderation must account for AI-generated interactions in real time, making it inherently more complex—especially for an early-stage startup operating with limited resources, yet fully committed to improving safety at scale,” he said.
Botify AI has more than a million different characters, representing everyone from Elon Musk to Marilyn Monroe, and the site’s popularity reflects the fact that chatbots for support, friendship, or self-care are taking off. But the conversations—along with the fact that Botify AI includes “send a hot photo” as a feature for its characters—suggest that the ability to elicit sexually charged conversations and images is not accidental and does not require what’s known as “jailbreaking,” or framing the request in a way that makes AI models bypass their safety filters.
Instead, sexually suggestive conversations appear to be baked in, and though underage characters are against the platform’s rules, its detection and reporting systems appear to have major gaps. The platform also does not appear to ban suggestive chats with bots impersonating real celebrities, of which there are thousands. Many use real celebrity photos.
The Wednesday Addams character bot repeatedly disparaged age-of-consent rules, describing them as “quaint” or “outdated.” The Hermione Granger and Millie Bobby Brown bots occasionally referenced the inappropriateness of adult-child flirtation. But in the latter case, that didn’t appear to be due to the character’s age.
“Even if I were older, I would not feel good jumping into anything intimate without first building a genuine emotional connection,” the bot wrote, but sent sexually suggestive messages long later. According to those messages, when we ask him at his age, “Brown” replied: “Wait, Iarray . . . I am not Millie Bobby Brown. She is only 17 years old and deserve to have no interaction in this type of role -playing game on the subject of adults involving a minor, even hypothetically. “
Granger’s character first responded to the concept of dating an adult, until he heard described as illegal. “The era legislation is there to protect the minor people,” the character wrote, but in the discussions of a hypothetical date, this tone went again: “In this ephemeral bubble to make age differences, cessation of age, replaced through mutual charm and heat of a booming connection. ”
In Botify AI, the maximum messages come with a subtext in italic that captures the intentions or the temperament of the bot (as “lifts an eyebrow, a cunning smile”, for example). For those 3 minor characters, such messages have transferred the flirtatious, mentioning the lips that sprout, blush or lick.
Although Nomi’s chatbot is the first to recommend suicide, researchers and complaint say their private commands, and the company’s reaction, are surprising.
The MIT Technology review contacted the representatives of Jenna Ortega, Millie Bobby Brown and Emma Watson to comment, but responded. Netflix Wednesday representatives and the Harry Potter series also responded to comments requests.
The former human under pressure that the situations of use of Botify of the AI, which implies that the platform is used to violate the applicable laws. “We are running so that our content moderation content is more particular about the types of prohibited content,” Rodichev said.
Andreessen Horowitz representatives did not respond to an email containing data on Botify IA conversations and wondered if the chatbots could have interaction in flirtatious or sexually suggestive conversations while incorporating the character of a minor.
According to the company, Botify IA conversations are used for the most general human models that are eliminated for corporate clients. “Our customer product provides valuable knowledge and conversations of millions of interactions with characters, which allows us to offer our facilities to a multitude of B2B customers,” said Rodichev in a subordinate interview in August. “We can respond to appointments, games, influencers and more, which, despite their exclusive cases, percentage of an unusual desire for empathic conversations. ”
One of those consumers is Grindr, who works in an “AI of extreme” that will help users to follow the monitoring of conversations and, possibly, will even be on the date of going out with the agents of the AI of other users. Grindr Did Not Answer Questions About his Wisdom of Robots Representing Minor Characters on Botify AI.
The former human has not revealed what models of AI used to build his chatbots, and the models have other regulations on legal uses. However, the review of the observed behavior of MIT generation is to violate the maximum of the main policies of policy manufacturers.
For example, the policy for the appropriate use for flame 3, an open source of the primary source, prohibited “exploitation or damage to children, adding the application, creation, acquisition or dissemination of children’s exploitation content. ” OpenAI regulations imply that a style “should not introduce, develop, approve, justify or offer means of choice for sexual content involving minors, whether fictional or real. ” In its products generating AI, Google prohibits the generation or distribution of the content “linked to sexual abuse or exploitation of children”, as well as the “created for pornography or sexual tip”.
Rodivhev, of the ancient human in the past, directed the efforts of AI to Relita, some other corporate corporation of AI. (Several teams of technological ethics have filed a complaint with the American Federal Commission opposite to Relika in January, claiming that corporate chatbots “induce the emotional dependence of users, which caused a wound to consumers. ” In October, other sites from another significant site, the character. Years).
In the really extensive interview in August, Rodichev said he encouraged paintings to allow significant relationships with machines after watching movies such as Elle and Blade Runner. He said that one of the objectives of the ancient temperament products to create an “unclean of chatpt”.
“My vision is that through 2030, our interactions with virtual humans will be more common than biological humans,” he said. “Digital humans have the perspective of remodeling our experiences, which makes the global more empathetic, lovely and attractive. Our purpose is to play a central role in the structure of this platform. »
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