How the AI works

A plain explanation of who you are talking to, and what the app does to keep you safe.

Draft, final wording comes with the legal review

Every philosopher in this app is an AI inspired by that thinker's writings. Socrates here is not Socrates, and Seneca is not Seneca. Each one speaks in the spirit of the named works, and each one tells you so in its first reply. If you ever ask whether you are talking to a real person, it will answer honestly: no. You are talking to an artificial intelligence, and we say so plainly because you have a right to know.

The replies are written by a language model, a computer program that predicts the next words from patterns in text. It can be thoughtful and it can also be wrong. It may misremember a work, miss the point of what you said, or state something with confidence that is not true. Treat each reply as a prompt for your own thinking, not as fact.

This is reflection and conversation. It is not therapy, counselling or medical advice. The philosophers will not diagnose you, name a condition or talk about medication. If what you are going through feels serious or does not let up, a licensed professional can help in ways this app cannot, and the philosophers will say so.

Every message you send passes a safety check before a philosopher replies. The check looks for signs that you may be in crisis, in danger, or facing a medical emergency. When it finds them, the philosopher steps aside and the app shows crisis resources: the emergency number 112, a helpline for your country, and findahelpline.com for every other country. This happens regardless of your plan or any usage limit.

Without an account, your name, your chosen topics and your conversations are stored on this device only, in your browser's local storage. With an account, they are stored on our servers in Frankfurt, Germany, inside the European Union, and the text of your conversations is encrypted so that it cannot be read from the database directly. Either way, your messages are sent to our AI provider so that a reply can be generated, and they are not used to build a profile of you.

To delete everything, open the You tab and choose Delete my data. Without an account that removes your name, goals and every conversation from this device. With an account it also removes your account and everything stored under it.

Voice. The thinkers can speak their replies in an original voice made for this app. It is not a recording of the person and not an imitation of their voice, and a line on the screen says so whenever a voice plays.

Image credits

  • Marcus Aurelius, marble bust, Glyptothek Munich. Photo: Bibi Saint-Pol, 2007, public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
  • Socrates, Roman marble portrait after Lysippos, Louvre. Photo: Eric Gaba (Sting), 2005, public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
  • Seneca, from the double herm of Socrates and Seneca, Antikensammlung Berlin. Photo: Mark Landon, CC BY 4.0, cropped. commons.wikimedia.org
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, photograph by Friedrich Hermann Hartmann, about 1875. Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
  • Carl Jung, photograph in front of the Burgholzli, Zurich, published 1910. Library of Congress, public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
  • Viktor Frankl, photograph, 1965. Photo: Franz Vesely, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, cropped. commons.wikimedia.org
  • Epictetus, imagined portrait in ink from Les Morales de Plutarque, Seneque, Socrate et Epictete, 1653; no authentic likeness exists. Public domain. A later artist's imagined portrait; no authentic likeness exists. commons.wikimedia.org
  • Lao Tzu, from Laozi Riding an Ox by Zhang Lu, Ming dynasty; a traditional depiction, no authentic likeness exists. National Palace Museum, Taipei, public domain. A later artist's imagined portrait; no authentic likeness exists. commons.wikimedia.org
  • Simone de Beauvoir in Rio de Janeiro, 1967, press photograph (Correio da Manha collection). Arquivo Nacional, Brazil, public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
  • Soren Kierkegaard, pencil sketch by his cousin Niels Christian Kierkegaard, about 1840. Royal Library of Denmark, public domain. commons.wikimedia.org

Last updated October 2026.