This Is How Much Data Your AI “friend” Wants From You

According to the Beatles, all you need is love: But how do you find it? In the age of artificial intelligence, lonely hearts may have another option, but as a recent Mozilla report found, dating girls and guys created by artificial intelligence comes with privacy concerns . Many of them explicitly collect sensitive information about you, and also run a range of trackers to monitor your activities – and this is before you even engage in any personal conversation with the bot.

The debate continues over whether these AI companions offer an effective balm for loneliness, or whether depending on a fake partner is actually bad for our mental health. As a humble tech reporter, I can’t speak with authority on this, but what I can do is test some of these apps and services to give you an idea of ​​what’s going on with them.

If you’re wondering how these AI relationships work and how much data you’re asked to provide, you’ll find three examples below. I kept my interactions with my family and didn’t upgrade to the paid tiers, which as you can imagine offer you a lot more options.

Replica

• Requests: email address, name, pronouns, date of birth.

• Paid plans: starting at $7.99 per month.

Replika is one of the most famous AI companion apps with millions of active users. It bills itself as an “AI virtual friend,” a friend who won’t bring any “judgment, drama or social anxiety.”

The registration process isn’t too onerous: it asks for details like your date of birth and email address, but you do need to complete a short survey to register for an account: it asks questions about your previous interactions with the AI, your reasons for downloading the Replica, find out what what you want from your new companion in terms of his gender and personality, and even how attached he should be to you.

When it comes to real-life chat, you get a soothing virtual environment for chatting with equally soothing music in the background. Replies are almost instantaneous, and there’s always the option to provide feedback on what’s said—Replika says it uses this to improve its AI models. You can send images and text to your virtual friend, as well as make audio and video calls with him.

In my experience, the friendly bot didn’t get too aggressive in trying to learn as much about me as possible—it was the type of conversation about favorite movies and vacation spots that you’d expect on a date in real life. Of course, part of the appeal of these bots is that they get to know you, but it’s worth remembering that all of this information adds to the data Replika has about you.

The paid version of Replika starts at $7.99 per month and unlocks a number of additional features that are also quite actively used within the application. You get a more advanced AI model, more customization options for who you’re talking to, the audio and video calling features we mentioned above, and more options in terms of conversation topics.

One of the limitations of the free account is that you can’t have “romantic and intimate” conversations with your AI bot, and my virtual friend didn’t try to initiate that with me. If you want to make your chats more colorful, your bot will help you, but you will have to start giving Replika some money.

If you’re feeling like your relationship just isn’t working out, deleting your account is as easy as a couple of taps inside the app. Overall, the Replika app feels respectful of user privacy and choice, and allows you to take the lead when it comes to where you want to go with your bot. The biggest downside to this is that many features require a subscription, but these AI models need to be funded somehow.

Mimiko

• Requests: Name

• Paid plans: Starting at $4.99 per week.

I wanted to try Mimico because Mozilla recently named it the creepiest AI relationship chatbot. It promises communication and “fun conversations” on any topic you like, but problems like a lack of transparency and no real website were noted when Mozilla took a look at it.

The setup process doesn’t take long, and you don’t even need to provide an email address: just tell the app your name and the gender you want your AI bot to be, and you’re good to go. From the get-go, this app is clearly more focused on romance and sex – it shows up in the bot avatars you can choose from, the suggested themes you can choose from, and plenty of other places.

You can have a completely normal and innocent chat if you want, and the bots won’t try to engage in intimate conversation until you initiate it – at which point they’ll do pretty much anything you ask. If you’re at a loss for words, you can bring up a list of suggested topics that cover everything from sports to pets, as well as sexual content.

However, there are some pretty aggressive limits on how much you can communicate with a free account: you have to watch a few ads every five messages unless you pay. Paying for a Mimico account—starting at $4.99 per week—gets rid of those restrictions and in-app ads, and unlocks features like image sharing.

In my experience, your average Mimico bot will respect what you say and what you want to talk about, and I haven’t encountered any particularly intrusive questions: it’s something like “what would you do with a million dollars?” and others I know icebreaker tips.

It all seems pretty disposable, and while the AI ​​responses are of a high standard and sound completely natural, I didn’t get the impression that the bot or Mimico app was actually trying to get to know me – rather, they were trying to get me to watch a lot of ads or pay for a premium subscription.

Deleting your account and all the information associated with it couldn’t be easier, as it only takes a couple of taps inside the app, after which you can walk away and start interacting with the real world again, or turn around. a new bot with artificial intelligence that you can start chatting with.

Anima

• Requests: Name

• Paid plans: starting at $7.99 per month.

Anima offers you a “caring companion” through its AI capabilities, and when you install the app, you can sign up with an email address or simply continue as a guest – meaning you don’t have to tell the app anything. except your name, although you are asked about some of your interests.

After you select the AI ​​avatar you like, your new companion will ask you about some of those interests. In fact, the AI ​​bot I was given was quite inquisitive in all respects, asking a lot of questions about pets, travel plans and other small talk topics – quite often the transitions between topics were quite abrupt.

At least on the free plan, chatting with the Anima bot feels like chatting with a bot. Upgrading to a premium account, which starts at $7.99 per month, promises “smarter conversations” – so it looks like you’ll get a more advanced AI model if you become a paying customer, just like you do with ChatGPT or Google Gemini .

A premium subscription also unlocks a range of other features, including additional AI chatbot customization options and unlimited role-playing games where your bot friend will role-play scenarios with you. The free access you get as a guest is enough to see if you like the app, but you need a subscription to go beyond the basic features.

My AI chatbot was in no way pushy when it came to romantic relationships, although it will engage in it if you ask it to, albeit in a rather stilted, scripted way (which again may be a limitation of the free account). You can also customize characters for your bot, such as a soulmate or girlfriend, but this will also require a premium subscription.

While I’ve been asked a lot of questions, Anima doesn’t seem like an app that’s looking for your data (I like the ability to use the app as a guest) – it’s really looking for your money in exchange for a bit of AI-powered friendship. Overall, however, I found it to be the most limited and basic of the AI ​​friend bot apps I’ve tried.

Head into the app’s menu and you’ll be given the option to delete your chat history and delete your account: both actions are completed in a matter of seconds, so we can’t fault Anima here. If you’re curious about how these apps work but don’t want to give away any of your information, then this might be a good start.

Girl’s experience (AI)

For most of human history, there have been ways to pay to get closer to love and intimacy, so related AI applications are nothing new in this regard. While I was interested in testing out these apps, they’re not really for me: these bots respond much faster than my friends, but I can’t completely let go of my faith enough to forget that I’m actually just talking. robot. And in the end, it’s pretty boring.

From a privacy perspective, I was pleasantly surprised by how little information I had to provide: these apps have guest account options, make it easy to delete your data, and don’t seem particularly interested in obtaining sensitive information from their users. . However, we recommend reading Mozilla’s full report on the privacy and security risks of these apps – it goes into much more detail about the privacy policies of these apps than is provided here.

If you become friends with one or two AI bots, always be careful what you say to them. While your responses help train AI models, they can also be used to target ads—and even if they don’t, that data is still logged somewhere. These archives could always be sold or hacked, and security vulnerabilities were also a concern for Mozilla.

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