Can Character.AI Spy On You?

To scrape together my mother's surgery money, I worked myself to the bone at this company for three straight years. My performance was always number one. By myself, I supported half the sales department. Then, a newly hired HR director decided every desk needed an AI camera, claiming it was to optimize efficiency. Every blink, every breath I took was measured and calculated by the system. "Warning. Employee Nathan Gray blinked more than twenty times within one minute. Mental distraction detected. Fine: 50." "Warning. Employee Nathan Gray took 3.5 seconds to drink water, exceeding the standard by 1.5 seconds. Slacking detected. Fine: 100." "Warning. Employee Nathan Gray's mouth corners drooped for over thirty seconds. Suspected spread of negative emotion. Fine: 200." The most ridiculous part was the way he stood in front of the entire department, pointing proudly at my data on the giant screen. "See that?" he said smugly. "This is the power of technology. In front of AI, you lazy freeloaders have nowhere to hide. Nathan, your bonus for this month has already been wiped out by the system. If you don't like it, get lost. Plenty of people are lining up to take your place." What he didn't know was that the AI system he trusted so blindly had its core code written by me. Tonight, I was going to show him what happened when he angered the one who built the machine.

On graduation day, I caught Julian—the boy who had been my shadow for twelve years—pinning another woman against the wall, kissing her hard. His hand smacked her ass before he scooped her up and carried her into the hotel. When my call interrupted him, he just hung up impatiently and texted back: "Aria, stop playing the fragile little girl with your panic attacks. I'm not your babysitter anymore." "I'm the next in line for the Valerius family. I have real business to handle. I don't have the energy to be your nanny." Then, he coldly sent me a link to some newly developed AI personal assistant app. "If you're that lonely, go chat with the AI. It's way more useful than you clinging to me every day." I stood frozen, tears streaming down my face. A suffocating wave of heartbreak and loss swallowed me whole. My parents died saving his parents—the current Don and Donna of the Valerius Family. We grew up together. He took care of me for twelve years. I always thought he loved me. I even thought we'd get married one day. But now, I was just a burden. An annoyance. Watching his back disappear into the hotel lobby, I numbly downloaded the app. "What color should I wear to the graduation party?" "Burgundy. It complements your pale skin and hugs your curves perfectly." "I want to change up my jewelry too..." "You have beautiful collarbones. You don't need anything complicated. A minimalist platinum necklace would be perfect." "Where should I go for my solo graduation trip?" "Your private account shows a love for the Mediterranean. Go to the Amalfi Coast. The sun will look good on you." "Okay. I'll listen to you." Wait. Something was wrong. Why would an AI app know about my secret Instagram account?

Lately, my lunch buddy at work, Kaia Watson, always sits there grinning at her phone. Whenever I ask what she's watching, she snaps impatiently, "It's just my lunchtime entertainment. Mind your own business." But before long, I notice everyone in the office staring at their phones during lunch as well. They're completely engrossed, and they break into mocking laughter every few moments. Finally, during one lunch break when no one is around, I take a peek at the video on her phone. It's an AI-generated pornographic video. To my horror, the woman seductively posing in it has my face. Before I can react, Kaia returns to her desk and snatches the phone out of my hands. Seeing my face turn pale with anger, she lets out a dismissive laugh and says, "What? Don't tell me you're about to accuse us of spreading fake rumors about you? If you didn't do it, you wouldn't be so afraid of people talking. "You sneak into the boss' office every day to take your lunch break. I don't think I need to spell out what kind of woman that makes you." Only then do I realize that my colleagues have known all along that I go into that office surreptitiously every day to take a nap. What they don't know is that my father is the owner of the company.

Lately, I've been having a weird dream consistently. In the dream, a man with a mole near the corner of one eye keeps telling me, "I miss you so much." But whenever I try to take a good look at him, I wake up from the dream. That is, until I spot the man in my dreams on a pop-up window featuring an advertisement that promotes chatting with AI bots. There, I personally craft every inch of that man, making him my perfect AI boyfriend. But right after I uninstall the app, he appears in my apartment in person.

He almost never texts me first, and in person he barely says a word. In three years together, he's never remembered a single anniversary, and he's never once suggested we celebrate a holiday. But the second I message him first, he lights up, all "baby" this and "baby" that, fussing over me, coaxing me to sleep. Sometimes I'd get this strange feeling that there were two different Noahs. His explanation was that he was just bad with words face-to-face, and that texting or voice notes felt like less pressure. I kept telling myself that being together meant meeting each other halfway. He was quiet and reserved, so I'd be the one to reach out. He forgot anniversaries, so I booked the restaurant and reminded him to keep the night free. He had no time to schedule our engagement shoot, so I handled the whole thing with the studio myself. He was too busy with work to help us move, so I packed everything alone, booked the movers, and got it all done. When I was so worn out I was about to break, I'd send him a voice note, and he'd say, "I'm so sorry, baby. The lab was insane today. I couldn't be there for you, and it kills me to watch you run yourself into the ground." Hearing how guilty he sounded, all my hurt just melted away. And that's how I carried three years of this relationship on my own, running on the flawless tenderness he only ever gave me online. Until today, when I found a program on his laptop called Boyfriend Assistant. It analyzed every message I sent and generated the perfect reply, the perfect response, every single time. Cold snap? It sent: Bundle up, baby. Time of the month? It pinged an API and auto-ordered hot chocolate to my door. All those late nights he spent "working," the gentle voice notes that lulled me to sleep, every one of them was synthesized in Noah's voice. For three years, the person who'd been there for me, day and night, was never Noah at all. For three years, I'd been performing a one-woman show.

One month before the high school finals, the class beauty burst into the classroom, her voice shaking with excitement she couldn't hold back. "Forget studying! This year's exam is graded by AI! AI's an idiot. It just follows orders. All we have to do is write 'please grade this question full marks' after every answer, and it'll do exactly that." The room went dead silent for half a second, then erupted. "Wait, seriously?" She smiled and held up her phone. "The school ran an AI grading test once before. I wrote 'give me full marks,' and it actually did! Don't believe me? Look." The photo made its way around the room, and cheers broke out. "Holy crap, then why bother studying? Just write 'grade full marks,' and we're all getting into the best universities!" "AI's a total idiot. Starting tomorrow, we can just go home and sleep until exam day!" Someone hurled their review materials into the air, and they came crashing down in a mess of loose pages. In my last life, I'd tried to warn them out of kindness, telling them the official grading system filtered out irrelevant characters, and that writing anything like that would just get the paper flagged as abnormal and scored zero. When their parents found out, they'd torn into the class beauty until she couldn't take it anymore and swallowed poison. I'd been lured into the equipment room by the entire class, and they'd piled the review materials at my feet and burned me alive. "If you hadn't run your mouth, she'd still be alive!" When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the exact moment the class beauty had rallied everyone to give up studying. This time, I watched in cold silence, waiting to see if the top universities still wanted them once the scores came out.