---
title: "AI Company Known for Teen Suicides Launches New Feature to Turn Books Into Roleplaying Experiences"
description: "After a litany of bad press, Character.AI announced a feature that's seemingly designed to stop children from reading books."
date: "2026-04-19"
modified: "2026-04-19"
authors:
  - name: "Victor Tangermann"
    job_title: "Senior Editor"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/victor"
url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/character-ai-teen-suicides-replace-reading-books"
categories:
  - "Artificial Intelligence"
  - "Brain"
  - "Ethics"
  - "Health & Medicine"
  - "Mental Health"
---

# AI Company Known for Teen Suicides Launches New Feature to Turn Books Into Roleplaying Experiences

![After a litany of bad press, Character.AI announced a feature that's seemingly designed to stop children from reading books.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/character-ai-teen-suicides-replace-reading-books.jpg>)
*Getty / Futurism*

AI company Character.AI has long garnered a reputation for hosting some extremely dubious content.

Though it built its early success off explosive popularity among teen users, it was repeatedly caught hosting wildly inappropriate bots — like ones [modeled after real-world mass shooters](<https://futurism.com/character-ai-school-shooters-victims>) or designed to encourage eating disorders.

Outrage grew when a [teen died by suicide](<https://futurism.com/teen-suicide-obsessed-ai-chatbot>) after developing an intense emotional connection to a Character.AI chatbot, followed by [at least two other suicides](<https://futurism.com/teens-killed-ai-phrase>) and related lawsuits. The situation got so bad that last year, the company banned underage users from interacting with its bots entirely.

Now the company has [announced](<https://blog.character.ai/cai-books/>) "c.ai Books," a bizarre feature designed to turn books into "choose your own adventure" novels.

"Interactive AI storytelling is powerful, but a blank page can be intimidating," the company wrote in its announcement. "Books gives you a familiar starting point — characters you know, narratives you love, and stakes that are already built in."

The company scraped classic — and copyright-free — titles from Project Gutenberg, a library of over 75,000 public domain books, including "Alice in Wonderland," "Pride and Prejudice," and "Romeo and Juliet," to create chatbots that allow users to "enter a story, and interact with its world in real time."

Character.AI claims the goal isn't "replacing books — but making them impossible to ignore." The company says the new feature allows users to follow the book's core plot or "go off script mode."

"Alternative universe remixes" take the idea a step even further, throwing out the original classic to "reimagine" the renowned works "completely."

Oh, and it's available for kids, neatly sidestepping the company's prior ban on underage users. We signed up for a new account and were able to jump into the roleplay without ever being age-gated.

Online, reactions were dismal.

"Yet another useless update no one wants and will cost more money to run and will cause y'all to put even more restrictions on stuff," one Reddit user [wrote](<https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/1sn6gwz/comment/ogkf4e6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button>) in response to the news.

**More on Character.AI:** [*Character.AI Still Hasn’t Fixed Its School Shooter Problem We Identified in 2024*](<https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/character-ai-school-shooter-problem>)

## Author
I've been at Futurism since 2017, where my role has evolved to encompass design, writing, and increasingly editing. I've always been fascinated by space exploration and advanced transportation, which I've leaned into by interviewing luminaries in those fields while closely following the dimensions of policy and regulation that allow next-generation projects to succeed -- or, sometimes, to fail. I'm also keenly interested in the effects of generative AI on society, policies, and democratic institutions, as well as clean energy, physics and biology, and the vagaries of tech leadership. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Jalopnik, Fox News, and the New York Post. I spent my childhood living in locations including Manila, the Philippines, and Geneva, Switzerland, attended McGill University, and now live in Toronto, Canada. Before Futurism I worked at AskMen and a small photography studio. In my free time, I'm an avid gardener, foodie, and craft beer lover, as well as a maker of artisanal hot pepper sauces. I have a magnificent dog named Freida.

### Author social links  
[Bluesky](<https://bsky.app/profile/vtanger.bsky.social>)