What to know
- Conversations between you and any character are private unless shared with the public.
- The creator of a character cannot read messages you send to their character.
- Character AI’s developers may have access to your messages but they’re anonymous and cannot be linked to your account.
Launched in late 2022, Character.AI has become an internet sensation, letting users converse with AI-generated characters for education, therapy, or just plain entertainment. The platform uses a neural language model that can generate human-like text responses because of which the AI chatbot can participate in a natural conversation that understands contexts.
You can have conversations with any number of characters available on Character AI and can also create your own characters with your preferred personalities and parameters. One of the concerns of using such AI chatbots has been privacy; can Character AI or any of its creators have access to the messages you share with them? That’s what we’ll explain in this post.
Can Character AI see your chats?
From the looks of it, it doesn’t appear like Character AI views your chats on the platform. Character AI’s privacy policy doesn’t reveal any information on whether the messages you send to a character are accessible to the developers of Character AI. The policy only reveals that it collects the contents of the messages you share when you directly communicate with the company or its personnel.
Can a character’s creator see your chats with the character?
Character AI allows you to interact with several characters on its platform, a large number of which have been created by other Character AI users. Although you can use any character to chat with, the messages you share with these characters won’t be accessible or visible to the creator of the character. This has been officially confirmed by Character AI on their FAQs page.
Are conversations between you and characters private?
Any conversation you have with a character is private to you as long as you don’t share them with others. The platform gives you control over whether the content is shared with the public or is accessible only to you. If you create a post that can be visible to others in the community (i.e. a public post), Character AI’s moderators will review your post to make sure they don’t have a negative impact.
There’s a possibility that the private messages you send to a character are read by the platform’s developers or staff for training the AI and improving its quality.
The screenshot above (between a user and Character AI) reveals that while your messages can be accessible to the developers, the platform itself won’t be able to link these messages to your account, meaning your messages will be anonymous.
What data does Character AI collect from you?
Character AI’s Privacy Policy doesn’t clearly mention whether it collects content from the messages you send to one of its AI characters but it does have access to these sets of data when you use their platform:
- Personal information like your name and account details
- Communication information like messages you send directly to the Character AI’s developers
- Contact information like your contacts data when you share content on other social media platforms
- Usage information like the number of visits, time spent, broad geographical information, navigation pattern, content you viewed or engaged with, and actions taken
- Log data which includes your IP address, browser type, time of the request, device information, and OS type
- Cookies and analytics
The platform claims the data it collects remains internally but can sometimes be shared with third parties for improving and maintaining its service.
That’s all you need to know about whether Character AI can see your chats.
