‘Lobotomized’: Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks Like
Character.ai users are expressing significant dissatisfaction with recent changes to the app, claiming it has been ruined. The company has implemented new restrictions and replaced popular AI models, leading to a backlash from its community. This situation reflects broader issues in the AI sector regarding user experience and operational economics.
- ▪Character.ai users are overwhelmingly upset about recent changes to the app.
- ▪The company has increased restrictions for free users and replaced popular AI models with a new one called Pipsqueak 2.
- ▪Many users are seeking alternatives and expressing their frustrations on dedicated subreddits.
404 Media files mainly under tech. We currently carry 64 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/lobotomized-character-ai-is-showing-what-ai-enshittification-looks-like/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 14:20:52 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T14:23:01.593Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T14:23:01.593Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 6A4VeuWrpriA |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Users of the chatbot app Character.ai have been melting down on Reddit and begging the company to stop messing with the app after a series of changes that users say has completely ruined the app. 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.Character.ai is one of the most popular AI companion chatbot apps; it allows users to create virtual characters to chat with. Over the last few years, users have used the chatbots for companionship, to form romantic relationships, to entertain themselves, and to role-play.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from 404 Media
