Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show - eviltoast
The privacy mess is troubling because the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than in a typical app.
  • Gork@lemm.eeEnglish
    721·
    9 months ago

    Are there any Open Source girlfriends that we can download and compile?

    • herrcaptain@lemmy.caEnglish
      56·
      9 months ago

      Hey now, I don’t want anyone looking at my girlfriend’s source code. That’s personal!

      • demonsword@lemmy.worldEnglish
        30·
        9 months ago

        I don’t want anyone looking at my girlfriend’s source code

        it’s okay, dude, we all already did…

    • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
      16·
      9 months ago

      The bots (what the actual girlfriends or whatever other characters are) aren’t the problem. You can find them on chub.ai for example or write them yourself fairly easily. The issue the software, and even more so the hardware. You need something like the mentioned Kobold.ccp or oobabooga, and then you’d also need a trained LLM model that you can get on huggingface.co, which is already where it gets complicated (they’ll be loaded within kobold or oobabooga). You also need to understand how they work in regards to context sizes & bytes, because they need a lot, and I mean A LOT of vram to work properly. Basically, the more vram you have, the better the contextual understanding, their memory is. Otherwise you’d have a bot that maybe knows to only contextualize the last couple messages. For paid services like novelai.net you basically have your bots run through big ass server farms with lots of GPUs that bundle their vram and processing power, giving you “decent” context sizes (imo the greatest weak point of LLMs and it is deeply rooted in how they work) and decent speed. NovelAI also supports front-ends like SillyTavern which is great for local bot management and settings, regardless if you self host or use a paid service (NOT EVERY PAID SERVICE HAS AN API FOR THIS! OpenAI’s ChatGPT technically does too but they do not allow NSFW content and can ban you for that if caught).
      There’s a bunch of “free” online services too, like janitorai.com but most of them have slow speeds and the chat degrades significantly after just a few messages, because they have low context sizes. The better / paid models suffer from this degradation too but it is slower and less noticeable, at least at first. You can use that to get an idea of how LLMs work though.

      Edit: Should technically self explanatory / common sense, but I would advise not to share ANY personal information through online service chats that could identify you as a person!

      • Gork@lemm.eeEnglish
        19·
        9 months ago

        Does it make it faster if the GPU has waifu stickers on it?

      • SwampYankee@mander.xyzEnglish
        12·
        9 months ago

        Basically, the more vram you have, the better the contextual understanding, their memory is. Otherwise you’d have a bot that maybe knows to only contextualize the last couple messages.

        Hmm, if only there was some hardware analogue for long-term memory.

          • SwampYankee@mander.xyzEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            I guess I’m wondering if there’s some way to bake the contextual understanding into the model instead of keeping it all in vram. Like if you’re talking to a person and you refer to something that happened a year ago, you might have to provide a little context and it might take them a minute, but eventually, they’ll usually remember. Same with AI, you could say, “hey remember when we talked about [x]?” and then it would recontextualize by bringing that conversation back into vram.

            Seems like more or less what people do with Stable Diffusion by training custom models, or LORAs, or embeddings. It would just be interesting if it was a more automatic process as part of interacting with the AI - the model is always being updated with information about your preferences instead of having to be told explicitly.

            But mostly it was just a joke.

        • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
          1·
          9 months ago

          Yes, databases (saved on a hard drive). SillyTavern has Smart Context but that seems not that easy to install so I have no idea how well that actually works in practice yet.

    • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      9 months ago

      Pretty easy to roll your own with Kobold.cpp and various open model weights found on HuggingFace.

      • TipRing@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        9 months ago

        Also for an interface, I’d recommend KoboldLite for writing or assistant and SillyTavern for chat/RP.

      • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
        4·
        9 months ago

        I tried oobabooga and it basically always crashes when I try to generate anything, no matter what model I try. But honestly, as far as I can tell all the good models require absurd amounts of vram, much more than consumer cards have, so you’d need at least like a small gpu server farm to local host them reliably yourself. Unless of course you want like practically nonexistent context sizes.

        • exu@feditown.comEnglish
          4·
          9 months ago

          You’ll want to use a quantised model on your GPU. You could also use the CPU and offload some parts to the GPU with llama.cpp (an option in oobabooga). Llama.cpp models are in the GGUF format.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      9 months ago

      Isn’t this what every app on your phone is already doing? Why would “AI Girlfriend App” be any better than Facebook or Google?

      • mishielda1234@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        9 months ago

        It’s even more insidious because these apps ask for the data upfront under the guise of “getting to know you better”

        How can your AI girlfriend truly love you back unless you give it your real name, age, photos of your face, mother’s maiden name, social security number, and genetic material? /s

      • TheFriar@lemm.eeEnglish
        8·
        9 months ago

        lol it’s not. That’s the point. It’s all the same sort of companies putting these fucking things out. Google and Facebook are both working on their own AI. It’s been shown over and over how they’re scraping all available data—public or private when available—so why the fuck would a newer tech company be any different? It’s the state of capitalism. The markets are focusing more on hyper focused data, so that’s what any profitable tech company is doing. Invading your fucking privacy.

        That’s why it’s not a surprise. Because Facebook and google helped set the trend and determine the current tech market. And that’s the world these new “AI girlfriends” are existing in.

  • maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
    21·
    9 months ago

    The entire internet is a data harvesting horror show. It’s good for the economy though, so we don’t do anything against it.

  • Petter1@lemm.eeEnglish
    13·
    9 months ago

    If you not self-host your girlfriend, it is just prostitution. /s

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      4·
      9 months ago

      Indeed. She’s not really your girlfriend unless you own her completely and can control everything she thinks.

      • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
        3·
        9 months ago

        “AI” is funny anyway because you’re basically gaslighting them the whole time to have them behave as they’re supposed to.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          3·
          9 months ago

          And their whole purpose in return is to try to guess exactly what you want to hear from them.

          AI is so human!

  • orbit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    9 months ago

    People panned the game but this was the whole point of the NG Resonance character in Deus Ex Invisible War. People would basically tell this AI pop star intimate details about their lives and then the data was used against them and their local communities.

    • Murdoc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      I always wondered though, how many of those people were aware that it was an ai and not the real NG Resonance? (Have to admit, she did get me in trouble with the Omar. My bad. 😅)

      • orbit@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        I think they knew and it didn’t matter to them which is oddly prophetic when I look at the state of the world today lol

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    111·
    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    According to a new study from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project, AI girlfriends and boyfriends harvest shockingly personal information, and almost all of them sell or share the data they collect.

    “Although they are marketed as something that will enhance your mental health and well-being, they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity, all while prying as much data as possible from you.”

    Every single one earned the Privacy Not Included label, putting these chatbots among the worst categories of products Mozilla has ever reviewed.

    You’ve heard stories about data problems before, but according to Mozilla, AI girlfriends violate your privacy in “disturbing new ways.” For example, CrushOn.AI collects details including information about sexual health, use of medication, and gender-affirming care.

    One of the more striking findings came when Mozilla counted the trackers in these apps, little bits of code that collect data and share them with other companies for advertising and other purposes.

    EVA AI Chat Bot & Soulmate pushes users to “share all your secrets and desires,” and specifically asks for photos and voice recordings.

    The original article contains 545 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!