Character.AI’s plan to become more than just an LLM-powered chatbot platform is going beyond interactive books, comics, and audio dramas. Today, the company announced the debut of c.ai Series — short-form, episodic videos designed to be watched and interacted with — on your phone.
Unlike traditional microdrama services that feature cheaply produced, live-action shows starring human performers, c.ai Series are animated and almost entirely made with generative AI. The company’s interest in getting into the microdrama space isn’t surprising considering that it’s projected to become a $26 billion industry in the next few years. And even though some young people have begun to take a stance against gen AI, that might not be an issue for the folks already using Character.AI.
Each of Character.AI’s microdramas revolves around a different set of characters being thrust into adventures that map neatly onto popular genres like romance, horror, and sci-fi. You can already find plenty of that kind of stuff on other microdrama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox. But what sets c.ai Series apart is the way that viewers will be able to chat with characters after they’ve finished watching an episode.
Character.AI is kicking off this new initiative with three projects. Last Summer tells a story about secret admirers while leaning into an anime aesthetic, The Nighttime Game — which resembles Netflix’s Entergalactic — focuses on friends playing a deadly card game, and Eden Fallfollows a group of elite MMO players into a Ready Player One-style virtual reality that looks a bit like Genshin Impact. The three Series will all debut with 10 episodes that clock in at under two minutes each. The first eight episodes of each Series will be free to watch for all Character.AI users, but the final two will be behind paywalls.
Character.AI says that this first batch of Series were all developed by a human-led, in-house studio team “using AI as part of the production workflow.” But in the future, it plans to let creators produce original microdramas of their own using the company’s AI tools.
At a glance, Character.AI’s foray into microdramas seems very much like the company following in the footsteps of TV networks like Fox, Bravo, and BET that have already hopped onto the vertical video bandwagon. But when I recently spoke with Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand, he insisted that microdramas are an organic next step for the platform.
“Microdramas are a continuation of that broader arc of becoming a broader storytelling and entertainment platform that we’ve been on,” Anand told me. “This isn’t just a one-off thing we’re doing because microdramas are the next cool thing; it’s a very natural extension of what our users are already doing and it opens up another massive gateway into our community.”
Though Character.AI could have launched Series “six months ago by hitting three buttons,” Anand said that he did not want to rush the feature’s release because he isn’t interested in putting out video slop. Rather than leading with shows that were wholly made with gen AI, the company enlisted a “fantastic team of Hollywood screenwriters” to develop scripts with a small group of creators who penned extensive bibles detailing each story’s lore. Those scripts were then fed into Character.AI’s proprietary, agentic pipeline to generate visuals and audio that were edited together with traditional post-production software.
Development on these first three Series took a few weeks, which puts their production timelines on par with other microdrama platforms’ live-action offerings. The process might have been faster if Character.AI utilized third- party video generation models, but Anand wanted to keep things in-house in order to maintain visual consistency.
“The amount of innovation that has happened with text-focused LLMs has been exceptional, but there haven’t been equivalent advancements in the multimodal r for us to ensure visual and tonal consistency for characters across different scenes.”
