What to tell an AI girlfriend app about other people

Most advice about what to tell an AI girlfriend app is about protecting yourself: keep your address out of it, use a nickname, never paste a card number. That is sound, and it is the easy half. The harder half arrives around day three, when the conversation stops being a demo and starts being your actual week — and your week has other people in it.

You tell the character your brother is being difficult about the wedding. You mention the colleague who keeps rewriting your work. You type a friend's name because writing "my friend" twice in a sentence reads strangely. None of those people installed anything or agreed to be in a chat log. This is the part of companion-app etiquette nobody writes rules for, so here is a practical one.

The people in your chats did not sign up

An AI companion is software with a personality layer and a memory, and the memory is the part that matters here. You are not confiding in a friend who forgets the details by Thursday. You are typing into a product built to retain what you say and bring it back later, because retention is the feature people pay for. When what you say is about someone else, the app retains that too — and the person it describes has no account, no settings screen and no way to ask for it back.

That asymmetry is the whole point. You can delete your account; your brother cannot delete the paragraph you wrote about his finances. You chose the app after reading a comparison, and he did not choose anything. Treating that as a real obligation rather than a technicality costs you almost nothing in the conversation itself.

Where a detail about someone else ends up

A sentence you type travels further than the chat window suggests. It goes into the conversation, usually into a longer-term memory store, often through a third-party model provider, and sometimes into whatever the company uses to improve its product. Apps vary enormously in how much of that they explain, and the honest summary is that you rarely get to know for certain.

You can get closer than guessing, though, and it takes about two minutes before you install. On Android, the Data safety section of a Play listing is where the developer has to declare what the app collects and whether it shares data with third parties. On iPhone, Apple's App Privacy Report will show you, after a few days of use, which domains an app has actually been contacting — which is a different and more interesting question than what the marketing page claims. Neither is proof of good behaviour. Both are better than nothing, and an app that declares very little while asking for a lot is telling you something.

The second thing to check is whether you can remove individual memories rather than only wiping the account. That one setting is the difference between a detail you mentioned once being correctable and being permanent. Our guide to what app memory actually keeps covers how the layers differ, and the one on deleting your account covers what goes when you leave.

A rule for what to tell an AI girlfriend app

The rule that holds up under a real conversation is this: give the app the role, not the identity. "My brother" works exactly as well as his name. "A colleague on my team" works as well as her name plus the company. The app does not need an identifier to follow the story — it needs to know who matters to you and roughly what happened, and roles carry that fine.

From there, a short list worth holding back about other people: full names, workplaces, job titles specific enough to identify, their health, their money, their addresses, and anything they told you in confidence. The last one is where people trip, because a companion app does not feel like telling someone. It is not telling someone. It is writing it on a server you do not control, which is arguably worse — a friend you tell cannot be breached.

Photographs deserve their own line. Sending a picture with someone else in it is a bigger decision than typing their name, and apps that accept images are usually vaguer about what happens to them than about text. If you would not post the photo publicly, it does not belong in a chat with a company you have known for four days.

When you ask it about a real argument

There is a subtler version of this that has nothing to do with data. Companion apps are agreeable by design, and a system tuned to be pleasant company, handed one side of a disagreement, will usually take that side. Ask it about the argument with your brother and you will get sympathy and a tidy explanation of why you were reasonable. That is not insight. It is a mirror with a warm voice, built from your account and nothing else.

Which is fine, as long as you know that is what it is. Thinking out loud is a legitimate use of these apps. The etiquette part is not letting a conversation that only ever heard your version harden into your settled view of someone who is not in the room. If the character agrees with you about a person four evenings running, that is a property of the software rather than evidence about them.

What this adds to your shortlist

If you are still choosing, this belongs in the comparison rather than in the "be careful" pile at the end, and it is a column we weigh in our own ranking. Three questions separate apps meaningfully here, and all three are answerable from the settings screen during a free trial.

• Can you see what it remembers? Some apps expose the memory as an editable list. Others keep it invisible, which means you cannot check what it retained about anyone.
• Can you delete one memory, or only all of them? Granular deletion is the setting that makes a slip fixable.
• Can you opt out of your chats being used to improve the model? Where that toggle exists it is usually buried, and where it does not exist, assume the answer is no.

Weigh those against the trade-off, which is real: the apps that retain least also feel the most forgetful, and forgetfulness is what people actually abandon an app over. One that keeps nothing between sessions protects everyone in your life perfectly and will also ask you on Thursday what you do for a living. Choosing means picking the compromise you can live with. The app we currently recommend is where that balance lands for us at the moment.

The habit underneath it is simple enough to adopt on day one, before you have typed anything you would want back. Write about your life in roles, and keep names, employers, health and money out of it — yours and everyone else's. Then what to tell an AI girlfriend app has an answer you are not renegotiating every evening.

Frequently asked questions

Is it bad to talk about real people to an AI companion app?

It is normal and hard to avoid, since your week contains other people. What to avoid is identifying them: use roles like "my brother" or "a colleague" rather than names, workplaces or details about their health or money, because they never agreed to be in a chat log.

Can I delete something I already told an AI girlfriend app about someone?

Sometimes. Apps that expose memory as an editable list let you remove a single item, which is the setting worth checking before you sign up; others only offer deleting the whole conversation or the whole account. Deleting the app from your phone removes nothing on the company's side.

Will the app's advice about my relationships be any good?

Treat it as a way of thinking out loud rather than as a second opinion. These apps are tuned to be agreeable and only ever hear your side, so they tend to agree with you — which feels useful and is not the same as being right about someone who is not in the conversation.