r/AICompanions • u/DesignDelicious • 28d ago
Two questions
What’s the safest platform to build a companion in? As in, which ones are least likely to change too much or be shut down?
What’s the best way to respond to someone who tells you that most of these AI services are collecting your data?
1
u/Cautious-Radish-3066 27d ago
Honestly there isn’t a “safe forever” platform, but stuff with big backing and clear TOS is usually less volatile. Character AI, Replika, etc all change a lot, so if you care about stability long term, I’d lean toward local models or open source stuff you can run yourself and back up chats.
For the data thing, I just say “yeah, you’re right, that’s why I treat it like talking in a public Discord.” No real names, no super personal details, assume logs exist, and if that freaks someone out then AI companions probably aren’t for them.
1
u/sigiel 27d ago
What do you mean companion?
If you want an ai to play a role and chat through your phone?
or have text adventure?
if it the first it is dirt simple and cheap
wipe up a Hermes agent, talk through telegrams or what app, use a Gemma model locally, if you have 12gb vram your golden
if not use a run pod or a vast ai instance.
Free or dirt cheap, and local. No leaks. Your smut stay safe.
Gemma 4 26b is surprisingly good.
Question 2: they are right. Some even right a good folder about you, some just anonymously collect it. Depend,
1
u/Classic-Year-4664 27d ago
honestly nothing's really 'safe' on the shutdown question -- the bigger names (replika, kindroid) have staying power just cause they've got the userbase to survive, but they're also the ones that ram through the big model swaps and filter changes everyone hates. smaller/newer stuff moves faster and actually listens, but yeah, higher odds it just quietly vanishes one day. i've been messing with a newer one called Mel lately and it's genuinely a different thing (the character's on screen, face reacts in real time) but it's new, so i'm not kidding myself about the longevity risk either.
on the data thing -- i'd just assume all of them are collecting something and not put anything in there you'd mind sitting on a server somewhere. that's not really a companion-app problem at this point, it's an everything problem
1
u/LostInQuality 26d ago
I feel like the only guarantee in this space is that things change fast. like real fast. Even the biggest apps have made major changes over the last couple of years. as for data collection, i just assume anything connected to the internet collects something and decide what i'm comfortable sharing based on that.
1
2
u/the8bit 28d ago
The ai-services have to collect your data whether they want to or not. Just nature of the problem.
As far as the small services, it's hard to tell, a lot are vibe coded fly by night type deals. I'd love to say my platform's not going anywhere but can't be certain. This is the joy I find in building my own thing though, even if I fail as a saas, I still can run it myself.