Character.AI received a cease-and-desist letter from Disney, urging the chatbot company to remove Disney characters from among the millions of AI companions on its platform, Variety reports.
The company allows users to generate AI chatbots that can range from real people like Elon Musk to fictional characters like Hermione Granger, plus users’ own original creations. These chatbots can be quite unfiltered — in one particularly horrific case, a family sued Character.AI after a chatbot inspired by a Game of Thrones character allegedly encouraged their teenage son to commit suicide.
“Character.ai is freeriding off the goodwill of Disney’s famous marks and brands, and blatantly infringing Disney’s copyrights,” a Disney lawyer wrote in the cease-and-desist letter. “Even worse, Character.ai’s infringing chatbots are known, in some cases, to be sexually exploitive and otherwise harmful and dangerous to children, offending Disney’s consumers and extraordinarily damaging Disney’s reputation and goodwill.”
As of now, Character.AI, searches for Disney-owned characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Captain America, and Luke Skywalker yield no results. However, other characters from media copyrighted by Disney still appear in search results, such as Percy Jackson and Hannah Montana.
