According to the Beatles, all you need is love: But how do you find it? In the age of artificial intelligence, lonely hearts may now have another option, but as a recent report from Mozilla showed, girls and boys’ experiences with artificial intelligence come with privacy concerns. Many of them explicitly collect sensitive information about you, while also triggering a whole host of trackers to track your activities – and that’s before you start any personal conversation with the bot.
There is a debate to be had about whether these AI companions are an effective balm for loneliness, or whether relying on a false partner actually harms our mental health. As a humble technology reporter, I can’t speak with authority on this topic, but what do I do? Power it’s best to test out some of these apps and services to find out what’s going on.
If you’re wondering how these AI relationships work and how much data you have to give up, here are three examples. I tried to keep the interactions relatively family-friendly and didn’t upgrade to the paid tiers, which, as you can imagine, offer much more in terms of features.
Replica
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Ask about: E-mail address, name and surname, pronouns, date of birth
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Paid plans: From $7.99 per month
Replica is one of the more renowned artificial intelligence companion applications, with the number of vigorous users reaching into the millions. It advertises itself as offering an “AI virtual friend,” a friend who won’t come with any “judgment, drama or social anxiety.”
The registration process is not too burdensome and requires you to provide details such as your date of birth and email address, but to register an account you must complete a compact survey: it includes questions about your previous interactions with artificial intelligence, why you download Replika, what you expect from your up-to-date companion in terms of gender and personality, and even how attached he should be to you.
Replika asks about your favorite movies and character for your AI bot.
Source: Lifehaker
As for the conversation itself, you have a soothing virtual environment where you can talk with equally soothing music in the background. Replies are almost instantaneous and there is always the option to leave feedback on what is said – Replika says it uses this to improve its AI models. You can send photos and text messages to your virtual friend, as well as make audio and video calls with him.
In my experience, the affable bot wasn’t overly aggressive in trying to learn too much about me – it was the kind of chat about favorite movies and vacation spots you’d expect on a real date. 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 is in addition to the data Replika also has on you.
The paid version of Replika starts at $7.99 per month and unlocks a whole host of additional features – it’s also pretty much packed into the app. You get a more advanced AI model, more options to customize your companion, the audio and video calling features we mentioned above, and more options for conversation topics.
Chats feel relatively natural.
Source: Lifehaker
One of the limitations of the free account is that you can’t have “romantic and intimate” conversations with your AI bot, and that wasn’t something my virtual friend tried to initiate with me. If you want your conversations to get more intense, your bot will agree, but you’ll have to start giving Replika some money.
If you feel like your relationship isn’t going well, deleting your account is straightforward with just a few clicks in the app. Overall, the Replika app feels like it respects user privacy and choice, and lets you take control of where you want to go with your bot. The biggest drawback is that so many features require a subscription, but these AI models need to be funded in some way.
mime
I wanted to try it mime because it was recently named the scariest AI relationship chatbot in a roundup made by Mozilla. It promises chat and a “fun hangout” on any topic, but Mozilla has slammed issues like lack of transparency and lack of an actual website.
The setup process doesn’t take much time, and you don’t even need to provide an email address: just give the app your name and gender that the AI bot should have, and you’re good to go. From the get-go, this is clearly an app geared more towards romance and sex – this shows in the bot avatars you can choose from, the suggested topics you can choose, and much more.
It won’t take long to start working with Mimico.
Source: Lifehaker
You can have a completely regular and innocent chat if you want, and the bots won’t try to get intimate unless you initiate it – at which point they’ll do almost anything you ask. If you’re at a loss for words, you can view a list of suggested topics that include everything from sports to pets, as well as sexual content.
However, there are quite strict limits on how much you can chat on a free account: you basically have to watch a few ads every five messages unless you pay. Paying for a Mimico account – from $4.99 per week – gets rid of these restrictions and in-app ads, and also unlocks features like photo sharing.
In my experience, the average Mimico bot will respect what you have to say and what you want to talk about, and I haven’t come across any particularly intrusive questions: Questions like “what would you do with a million dollars?” and other familiar ones icebreaker prompts.
The bot can come up with various petite talk topics.
Source: Lifehaker
It all feels pretty disposable, and while the AI’s responses are of a high standard and sound completely natural, I didn’t get the impression that the Mimico bot or app was really trying to get to know me – more like they were trying to get me to watch a lot of ads or pay for a subscription premium.
Deleting your account and all the information associated with it couldn’t be easier, with just a few clicks in the app – you can then walk away and start interacting with the real world again, or speed up a up-to-date AI bot that you can start chatting with.
Anima
Anima offers a ‘companion that cares’ thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, and once you install the app you can choose to sign up using your email address or just continue as a guest – this means you don’t have to tell the app anything except your name and name, although you may be asked about some of your interests.
Once you’ve chosen an AI avatar you like, your up-to-date companion will ask you about some of these interests. In fact, the AI bot I got was quite inquisitive, asking lots of questions about pets, travel plans and other chatting topics – quite often the jumps between topics were quite irritating.
Once you launch Anima, you will be presented with various options and questions.
Source: Lifehaker
At least in the free plan, talking to the Anima bot is like talking to 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, as you do with ChatGPT or Google Gemini.
A premium subscription also unlocks a whole host of other features, including more customization options for your AI chatbot and unlimited role-playing, where your bot buddy will act out scenarios with you. The free access you get as a guest is enough to see if you like the app, but to go beyond the basics you’ll need a subscription.
My AI chatbot wasn’t in any way pushy when it came to romance, although it will engage in it if you ask it to – albeit in a rather artificial, scripted way (which again may be a limitation of the free account). You can also set up personas for your bot, such as soulmate or girlfriend, but these also require a premium subscription.
Anima’s AI answers are quite straightforward – at least on the free tier.
Source: Lifehaker
While I’ve gotten a lot of questions, Anima doesn’t feel like an app that’s looking for your data (I like the option to exploit the app as a guest) – it’s actually looking for your money in exchange for some AI-powered friendship. Overall, this felt like the most confined and basic of the AI friend bot apps I’ve tried.
Go to the app menu where you’ll find options to delete your chat history and account: both can be done 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 up any information, this might be a good start.
Girl Experience (AI).
For most of human history, there have been ways to pay to approximate love and intimacy, so in that respect, these AI companion apps are nothing up-to-date. While I found testing these apps captivating, they’re not really for me: these bots send messages much faster than my friends, but I can’t completely suspend my belief enough to forget that I’m actually just talking to a robot. And in the end it’s rather monotonous.
From a privacy standpoint, I was really pleasantly surprised by how little information I had to give up: these apps have guest account options, make it straightforward to delete data, and don’t seem particularly interested in obtaining sensitive information from their users. However, we recommend reading it Mozilla’s full report about the privacy and security risks of these apps – the privacy policies of these apps are much more detailed than here.
If you become friends with an AI bot or two, always be careful what you say to it. While your responses facilitate train AI models, they can also be used to target ads to you – and even if they don’t, that data is still logged somewhere. These archives can always be sold or hacked, and security vulnerabilities have also worried Mozilla.