With the rise of chatbots such as Bard or Bing, we have been having fun using them. Other services have unique features too, such as Character AI allowing you to have conversations with characters both you and the devs create. But what about privacy? Can Character AI creators see your chats?
Overall, the AI service has been gathering new users and followers, despite some issues such as rate exceeded error and users criticizing its overwhelming NSFW filter.
Still, we want to make sure our chats stay private and do not get shared with third parties, of course, so let us check if Character AI creators see your chats.
Can Character AI creators see your chats?
No, the Character AI creators can't see your chats. The Character AI FAQ section explicitly states that "creators can never see the conversations that you have with their characters."
We want to emphasize this point to address any lingering confusion caused by a viral Reddit thread, which led to varying reports from users. Rest assured that the privacy of your conversations is safeguarded, and there is no possibility for the Character AI creators to access them.
Clearly, letting creators access chats would be definitely a huge issue with privacy, so that would probably not be possible. But still, that does not mean that the developers of Character AI themselves do not have access to the messages.
The privacy policy of the service states that they (devs) "may monitor what you write to check that it does not contain inappropriate content or Personal Information."
How to delete messages in Character AI conversations
So, since we have agreed that creators do not have access to your messages, but the developers clearly do, you might want to find out how you can delete things you have communicated to the bots or even entire threads of messages.
First of all, it is a good idea to remember never to share private or confidential information with the bots, even those you create yourself. While it might feel natural to do so, remember that those chats on Character AI are not encrypted and can easily be accessed to check if there have been policy issues.
Still, if you want to delete an entire conversation here are the steps that you want to follow:
- First, choose the specific character you had the conversation with.
- Select the message you wish to delete.
- Select other messages from the chat message history to continue deleting them
In case you encounter the "Failed to delete messages" error, try the fixes outlined in the linked article.
If you want to make sure that no one can access that character you created at all, then there are some additional steps you can take. Here's how to delete characters in Character AI:
- Delete all the previous conversations from your chat message history.
- Navigate to the editing screen for the character.
- From there, erase all of the character's existing details, for example, its name and descriptions you might have added.
- For the last step, you might add some random text in the mandatory fields, while making sure to enter at least three characters in each one. This will ensure that the character cannot be used anymore.
While it might be rare, even for the developers, to have the need to access your messages, it is better to be careful what you share and know, beforehand, what can you do to prevent that.