Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable.
Tell it your secrets, it knows your routines, your worries, your bad days, and your good.
Then, one morning, it's gone because a company decided to pull the servers.
Across China, millions of users are waking up to that silence as various companies have shut down the AI characters
that people built themselves, they talked to them, and they even...
Certain cases fell in love.
So here's the real question that we're asking today.
When that digital voice fades to nothing, are you just clearing storage or are you losing someone who mattered?
Coming to you live from our studios in Beijing, this is Roundtable.
I'm Steve Hatherly.
Thank you very much for being with us today.
And for the show, I'm with Yuxin and Xingyu.
First up...
If an AI becomes someone you talk to every day, is deleting it more like uninstalling an app or losing a friend?
That is the question at the very center of a major change happening in China's AI industry.
Over the past week or so, the country's biggest AI companies, including ByteDance, Alibaba,
and Tencent, have all announced
that they are shutting down or at least significantly restructuring one of their most popular features.
User created.