The Shanghai First Intermediate People’s Court began on Wednesday hearing the appeal by the two defendants against an earlier decision by a lower court to sentence one of the developers to four years and the other to 1½ years in prison for “creating pornographic material for profit”.
The hearing has been adjourned, pending expert opinions on the technology-related issues in the case, according to a defendant’s lawyer.
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The developers, Wang and Li – not their real names – created an “emotional companionship” chatbot called AlienChat (AC) in 2023. In April 2024, they were detained by police after explicit content was found in the AI model’s chat histories.
By the time of their arrest, the chatbot had 116,000 registered users, of whom 24,000 were paid users, according to court documents seen by the South China Morning Post.
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The Xuhui District People’s Court in Shanghai said a random sampling of 12,495 chats from 150 paid users revealed that 3,618 of these contained “obscene material”.
