Hi everyone,
Bill here - I'm the CEO of AI Anyone, and the guy behind Honest AI.
For those of you not in the know, not too long ago I had released a post informing the community at large about a serious security vulnerability at Persona AI (an AI chatting service).
I openly called out Harp (their founder) for regularly exposing his users' OAuth2 Tokens; extremely sensitive information. Some quick background: they don't last forever, but when users are constantly logging in and new tokens are issued / refreshed, someone is bound to get snagged. Well, rather than acknowledge the very serious (and in all probability legal) issues, he chose to make a fool of himself in the comment section instead.
After my response, he proceeded to brigade the post in order to bury it altogether; it was much easier then addressing my comment on its merit. See, until around 3 and a half hours in, we were sitting at a very healthy 89% upvote ratio. I was addressing the community's security concerns, which were all understandable given the severity of the situation; I studied Computer Science for four years, so I was in my element here. Suddenly, we went from an 89% to 29% ratio in just over five minutes, and negative comments began pouring in. Interesting. Totally normal.
We over at Honest AI admittedly had an eye on these guys for a bit since they offered a similar service to ours. In an industry moving as fast as this one, it's important to stay sharp and understand the offerings of other companies, new developments etc. - that's why my company chose to investigate them since they were at the time mishandling all manner of different issues; that's something any of their users can tell you, what a mess. Google logins, and severe back-end issues that disrupted the service entirely, to name a few. Upon discovering the leak, and to great surprise as this caught us a tad off guard, we knew that this would be a disaster. There was no getting around what was to come.
Since a lot of information was at risk (and thus a TON of collective hours of work), we considered storing a backup of Persona's Public AI listings. Information (both public and private) had been made available by the thousands. Of course, we conducted our due diligence - we checked out what amounted to their "All Your Data Belong to Us" Policy and confirmed that any public AI information ( such as name, description etc.) were okay for distribution.
Back to Persona AI - obviously, none of this could stand, as the situation was an ongoing security risk. Although Harp had been defending his company's actions, he eventually decided to make some kind of vague apology that came across as quite insincere while declaring that pretty soon the company would shut down (Dec. 5). None of the primary concerns were addressed (no doubt he had been receiving lots of messages) and instead he spoke about it like he had been thinking about closing down Persona AI for quite some time and this was only the natural progression of things..?
Despite his announcement, by the 25th of November, I learned that his Discord server went completely dark and they kicked every member who wasn't a contributor. I fail to see how that's fair when people were given a date of closure, especially considering those that paid up got to stick around.
He had generously recommended comparable services for people to go to once his service shut down, but I think he did everything he could to pretend my company didn't exist even though we were genuinely the best match. I can't say that I blame him, as he likely blames us for this - to each their own! But like... dude, we've literally got a backup of your AI profiles. You know this. We rushed to build something your user-base would be familiar with; swallow your pride and inform your users that they have a place to go where their data is safe. Don't disingenuously suggest people should use this garbage for a similar experience.
The difference between our two platforms is that Honest A.I. takes privacy VERY seriously, and we have since day one. Users that have used our service for a time and built up some trust with us are willing to vouch for that, I'm sure.
Any AI listed publicly has been designed to always credit the original creators, and we also provide an easy way to request that AI be removed. This is a priority, because we want people to know that we respect users' creations; no questions asked, it's done.
Hopefully this helps. To be honest this has been a bit of a weird position for us for obvious reasons as we are literally a direct competitor of these guys - but sounding the alarm was the right call I feel. I tried to only bring up my own company as much as necessary to show that people's data exists safely and is available at any time. My goal is and always has been to provide meaningful contributions to the industry, and contributing to its safety is arguably more important than building a silly chatting service.
Below you can find a direct link to the Public AI listings (you can search for yours), and a Discord link for questions, comments, or concerns (note the request removal channel if you want your AI profile removed)
Marking this as self-promotion, just in case!
Until next time,
Bill
Honest A.I. Public A.I. Listings
[link] [comments]