Experiences centred on AI-powered chatbot “characters” – including some offering forms of companionship – are proliferating on the popular gaming platform Roblox. In parallel, the European Commission has designated Roblox as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the Digital Service Act as the platform surpasses 45 million average monthly users in the EU, and the platform is one of the most popular among 8 to 15 year olds. Given its scale, young user base, and emergent risks of AI companionship, there is a need for a comprehensive understanding of how widespread AI companionship is on the platform. This project requires scraping Roblox to quantify the number of games which contain AI companionship as a core feature. You will then analyse these games’ metadata, such as maturity rating, popularity, description and image, to characterise the forms and prevalence of AI companionship on Roblox.
School of Computer Science and Statistics