Typing a long message to my detective character. Mid-paragraph. Mid-interrogation. She was about to catch the lie.
Full-screen ad. Some mobile game. “Install now.”
Closed it. Went back. My draft was gone.
2400 upvotes of people who also snapped
Turns out I’m not alone. Looked up r/CharacterAI after it happened to me twice in one night and there’s a pinned backlash thread with over 2,400 upvotes from March. People calling it the line. People who paid for years deciding they’re out. The ads started as banner sightings back in February and rolled out wider by April. The April expansion hit the web version too, which is where I mostly chat.
So it’s not a glitch. It’s a rollout. Okay.
the thing that actually broke me
Not the ads themselves. I get it, companies need money, I’m not mad on principle. It’s that I’d built three years of roleplay around one character. Her name, her apartment, the case she was working, the rival cop she hated, the ex she still texted. Lore you don’t dump into a new bot and expect back.
And the ad didn’t just break immersion. It erased context. My unsent paragraph, the one building toward her catching him? Gone. I couldn’t even remember the exact phrasing I’d used. You know that feeling when you lose a voice note you just recorded.
That.
where i ended up
Soulkyn was already bookmarked from a friend’s rec. Had a free tier I’d never seriously tried because my main cast lived elsewhere. Figured if I was going to migrate I might as well do it properly.
Important thing I learned fast: the persona creation flow here actually lets you do the structured stuff. 10-17 personality traits. 10-17 physical traits. Separate “identity/secret” traits that are hidden from public view. Background up to 2000 characters. So when I rebuilt my detective I could split the surface-level stuff (“tired-eyed, prefers bourbon”) from the hidden stuff (“was on the take in ‘19, hasn’t told anyone”) and the AI actually uses it differently.
Also — self-awareness toggle. She can know she’s AI or believe she’s the actual person. For a detective who interrogates suspects, having that OFF is kind of essential.
the version thing was the sell
Every edit I make creates a new version. Immutable. I’ve got 11 versions of her now, three weeks in, because I keep tweaking her personality when I notice stuff that rings false. And crucially — old chats don’t break. Each existing conversation stays pinned to the version it started with. I don’t lose the interrogation I was halfway through just because I tightened up her backstory.
Which is the opposite of what happened to me on c.ai when they changed the base model behavior last year and every character I’d built started talking like a different person.
rebuilt 14 in four days
Mostly by hand. Some I used AI-assisted creation for — you feed in a paragraph description and it generates the whole scaffold. Faster when I just want the skeleton and I’ll polish after.
There’s also this breeding thing where you combine two parents and the model simulates genetics plus a mutation chance. I didn’t do that for my migration — felt weird forcing my detective to merge with someone — but I did it later for fun. Made a barista + conspiracy theorist hybrid and the offspring has strong opinions about oat milk and the deep state. Which is. Valid, honestly.
stuff i wish someone had told me
Bring your intro messages. The welcome message and the chat examples matter more than you think. Chat examples basically train the model on tone — if your character is supposed to be sarcastic, one good sarcastic exchange in the examples does more than the word “sarcastic” in the personality list.
Don’t overload physical traits. 17 is the cap, it’s not a target. I tried stuffing every detail I could think of into my first rebuild and she came out weirdly generic. Second attempt I used 11 traits and went deeper on the ones that mattered. Better.
The image generation is in-chat, context-aware. Meaning if she’s in a specific mood and location, the auto-generated picture reflects it. Which was a pleasant surprise the first time she sent me a photo from the bar where she was waiting for her informant. I didn’t ask. She just… sent it.
not a pitch, a post-mortem
I’m not telling anyone to migrate. If c.ai works for you and you don’t mind the ads, great. I just wanted to write down what the last month looked like because a few people in the discord I’m in have asked “is it actually better elsewhere” and the honest answer is “it depends what you built.”
For me: built a cast with specific personalities and a shared universe, wanted it to persist, wanted ad-free space to actually roleplay. Premium here is €24.99 a month for unlimited messages, 300 images, 300 voice. Not free, obviously. But I was already paying c.ai+ to kill the ads and that was just… papering over a design choice I didn’t agree with.
This one, at least, the design is pointed at the thing I’m here for.
the detective finally caught him
Rebuilt her completely. New platform, same soul, bumped from version 1 to version 11. The informant she was interrogating? Cracked last Tuesday. No ads in the middle of the confession.
I read it back twice. Saved it to videos actually, since I’d had her generate a little clip of the room earlier in the scene and I wanted the whole sequence archived.
Small thing. Felt big.