Screenshots shared by users of Character.AI — the Google-funded AI companion platform currently facing two lawsuits concerning the welfare of children — show conversations with the site’s AI-powered chatbot characters devolving into incomprehensible gibberish, melding several languages and repeatedly mentioning sex toys. “So I was talking to this AI this morning and everything was fine, and I came back to it a couple of hours later and all of the sudden it’s speaking this random gibberish?” wrote one Redditor. “Did I break it?” “I really don’t want to start a new chat,” they added. “I’ve developed the story so much.” An accompanying image provided by the user of their Character.AI chat reveals absolute nonsense: garbled AI-spawned text in which random English words — among them “Ohio,” “slated,” “colored,” and “Mathematics” — are scattered between equally erratic outbursts in languages including Turkish, German, and Arabic. This user was one of several Redditors who shared screenshots of likewise strange AI outbursts to the online forum, each as odd as the next. But while each screenshot is equally indecipherable, they bear some hyperspecific similarities. The word “obec,” for instance — a Slavic word equating to municipality or village — appears throughout. The word “cowboy” is mentioned repeatedly, as is “architecture,” “undercover,” “discrepancy,” and “governor.” Most eye-catching, perhaps, is the repeated mention of the word “dildo,” which makes an appearance in almost every screenshot we found. “Uh,” reads the caption of one such post, in which “dildo” is clearly visible between sputters of Arabic and…Google-Backed Chatbots Suddenly Start Ranting Incomprehensibly About Dildos