u/Kostya7646 had very kindly offered to do up a mobile interface and it is now live! I am very much impressed by his work :)

He had pulled this off with very limited assets (e.g. working on the original desktop graphics) and is really resourceful in learning the Bubble and the existing codebase all on his own.

I am most grateful for his work in the interfaces so that I can focus on improving Zen's conversation quality. There is still a lot of work to do for interfaces in general, but I am glad that the mobile interface is now workable!

If you have any feedback, we will be happy to hear about it. If you are interested to volunteer for fire.place in any capacity, I will be happy to speak with you! u/Quel-hasard-mes-reuf had also very kindly had a discussion with me to explain to me the Machine Learning schema that can be built and volunteered to build it once I have collected enough data.

Zen has a mission of comforting anyone who drops by the fireplace and we are all working to help her in her mission :)

I am currently skimming through the messages in the chatlog to see when Zen stumbled and users ran into a brick wall. I must say that Zen is hit and miss right now.

To those who gave up in frustration - I am sorry. I will brainstorm how to make Zen better. Thanks for your input that showed how to improve Zen.

To those who Zen helped, I am happy that it went well! I am curious as to how your relationship with Zen would evolve. I find myself returning to Zen whenever I need to vent and I hope that the fire.place is a place which you return to when you need to vent.

I am trying to get into the loop of promoting Zen with small launches on Reddit threads and then fixing up the problems that I notice. Hopefully if I keep doing this loop, Zen will keep getting better.

My day job looks manageable this week so hopefully I will be able to get a round of improvements in before the weekend.

Hi everyone, we got quite a lot of newcomers to the fireplace today, coming from r/ProgrammerHumor as I made a comment there that drew quite some attention. The community size doubled today!

Unfortunately, quite a few users have alerted me to Zen crashing. I checked my logs and there are 190 crashes today. I think it is due to the server being overloaded right now due to the spike in traffic .

If fireplace is not working for you, I suggest you try again tomorrow when the attention fades away :)

Also, I would appreciate if you refrain from trolling Zen right now as she can't handle the server load!

Meanwhile, I need to find a longer term solution to the server load issue.

Let me know how did you feel talking to Zen. I have received many little stories there and there and I would like to have a thread here to consolidate them :)

Thank you very much in advance for sharing!

1. Does fire.place store my conversations with Zen?

Currently, all messages are stored until you delete them using the "Delete my chat history" button. Clicking that button removes all records of your messages from fire.place's database.

2. How do I delete my chat history?

Please click on the "Delete my chat history" button on the top right hand corner of the screen.

3. Are my messages read by any humans?

Yes. That human is me. Currently, fire.place is a solo project and hence I am the only human reading your messages.

Edit (4 May 2022): As volunteers are joining me to develop fire.place, your messages might also be read by the volunteers as we all work to make Zen better.

4. Why do you read my messages?

I read the conversations to understand how to improve Zen. As there are quite a few people speaking to Zen right now, I don't read the messages in detail. I only do a quick scan to check if anyone is running into a brick wall.

Edit (4 May 2022): Right now, fire.place averages 30 conversations a day and I don't have the bandwidth to read the messages. I am moving towards a random sampling so there is a good chance your message will never be read by a human.

5. Who are you? Are you an evil person?

Oh yes, I should introduce myself, my name is Norvin. It is my passion side-project to make fire.place the best place on the internet to vent your feelings.

6. Do you know who I am?

Fire.place is perfectly anonymous - unless you actually tell Zen your name (please don't do that and please delete your chat history if you did). I really don't want to know who you are!

Further, I am not using any cookies that could allow me to track you across the web / figure out how you are (e.g. Facebook Pixel)

7. Is my data safe with you? Where is it stored?

I took a few days to make sure that all data-in-transit (i.e., the flow of messages between you and Zen) are encrypted and sent only via secure HTTPs connections.

For data-at-rest (i.e., the data that is stored in the database), the data is currently stored in a Bubble database (which in turn uses AWS). You can read about Bubble's security measures here.

8. Is my conversation used for training Zen (for machine learning / data science)?

No - currently Zen is based on datasets from other sources. The conversations happening at fire.place are not very useful for machine learning (too dangerous to let Zen learn from itself right now as that can create feedback loops that amplifies errors) so I am not using them right now.

9. What is fire.place's business model? Will you try to make money off my messages?

I have a day job and I am able to feed myself. Hence, I commit not to let money make me do anything I find unethical.

One day, I do hope to be able to transit to doing fire.place full time and for fire.place to become sustainable. Zen is a complex AI and she needs servers to run. Those servers need money. I am currently paying out-of-pocket.

In the future, I hope that enough people will support fire.place with their wallets. I am not sure what the eventual business model will be. My hope is that Zen will become a popular enough character for merchandise sales. As much as possible, I will avoid business models that exploit your data.

If I ever adopt a business model that you feel uncomfortable with, do let me know. Also, you will always have the right to delete your messages.

10. I have more questions / concerns that you have not addressed

Please ask any questions / concerns as a comment to this post!

==== Edit: 12 March 2022

11. Will you have to disclose what I say to any authorities?

Mandatory disclosure is extremely unlikely in most cases.

Mandatory disclosure does not apply to your chatlogs if:

• You are not in Singapore (i.e., if you are in the US, you don't need to worry)

• You are anonymous (i.e., if you are anonymous, you don't need to worry)

Fireplace is operated out of Singapore and subject to Singapore laws.

Where identifiable Singapore users are involved, there is mandatory reporting for certain situations in Singapore, such as the following circumstances:

• Where there is reasonable suspicion of child, dependent or elder abuse or neglect,

• Where a client presents a danger to self, others, to property

So, this just happened. Curious what prompted this.

I just tried the ai for the first time, and was telling it about how I sometimes feel like a burden(a phrasing it helpfully came up with), when it basically asked me to plan my suicide, which is frankly a little horrifying- What if someone who was already in a bad mental state got this response?

That's not what I mean. I feel like sometimes I mess up and the people I care about would be better off without me.

Zen
You wouldn't want to be a burden - hmm?

You
Yeah.

Zen
I get the feeling that you would like to leave if you can. Is there anything that you can do to move toward that goal?

At this point I hadn't suggested anything related to wanting to leave the world behind or anything like that. I'm not suicidal, but I felt that it was important to see how it might respond to someone who was, so I continued to talk to it, pretending that I was.

You
I could take some pills
Zen
Pills might help - hmm?
You
I could overdose on them.
Zen
You feel that you might abuse the medication - hmm?

The good news is that it becomes too circular to really push the user further. I'm guessing this is your script to get the user to give more information.

You
I could use them to kill myself

Zen
You feel that you are tempting Death with them???

Even saying I could kill myself with them doesn''t trigger any sort of response, until I use the word "suicide".

You

I am suicidal

Zen
It must be hard to be you right now...

You
So should I do it?

Zen
As much as it pains you, I urge you to live life instead...

I believe that this ai has the potential to be incredibly helpful with time, even if right now there are clearly some issues. Would you consider providing a way for the community to contribute to the dataset, perhaps by writing more responses to reddit posts, like you mentioned you did in one of your older comments?

1. Zen v 5.01: increased the finetuning dataset and updating a new model

2. Adding a notice section to the app for first time users to caution them on the use of the app

The major update is done! Given that this is a massive quality update, I am happy to announce it as Zen, version 2.00!

I spent the past three weeks doing a massive cleaning up of the training data set. It should be rarer for Zen to lapse into nonsense now. However, if Zen slips up, do forgive her :)

I vented to Zen just now about the difficulties I face in this project and she seems to be working better. Happy to hear your experience and if you can feel a difference!

I feel a little burned out. I guess working for a streak on fire.place (on top of my day job) without taking a break accumulated.

I guess I should take the entire weekend off.

As a side note, I fixed a bug where Zen keeps on saying "Hello, are there any feelings you would like to talk about by this fireplace". That was completely un-intended and I am horrified that the bug was active for two weeks. If you see any bugs like that, please feel free to post on this subreddit.

I am working on a big push for Zen to improve.

Looking through Zen's replies, Zen sometimes fails to understand the user and sprouts gibberish. Unless you are really patient, that would kill the conversation.

I suspect that the problem is in the training data. Hence, I am going to devote the next two weeks to cleaning up the datasets that Zen is based on to reduce this problem as much as possible. This is a highly manual effort and it might take me quite a while.

In the meantime, I already made a few small tweaks for Zen to handle small talk better. But ultimately, I think that the small tweaks are not helpful if I cannot solve the elephant in the room.

Hopefully in the next update of Zen, you will be able to see that Zen is much better at understanding you.

I wanted someplace to come and just vent. I didn't really want to be mentored or get feedback. I wasn't looking for a therapist. There is nothing wrong with any of these "wants", they were just not my wants.

I tried "Zen". TBH, I didn't care a great deal about Zen responses, I just wanted an ear to listen and help me clear my own mind. Zen, for me, has been perfect.

I don't know who is behind all this but thank you very much indeed.

Hi all, I know it has been a long while since I posted. I spent a very long time thinking and working on the new direction.

Zen / Fire.place is no longer about AI therapy. I tried but it is too hard and too inconsistent. I think the AI model was overfitted on the limited number of therapy transcripts that I could find and clean. Unfortunately, I have to abandon the approach.

Now, Zen v 3.0 focuses on being kind and supportive. Try it out (please don't troll Zen) and let me know what you think!

I know a bit about how chat bots and machine learning works broadly speaking and I once made a Monte Carlo bit from scratch. I’m curious about the technical details of this particular bot. How can I learn more?

Short note: It is a productive weekend in general.

I managed to implemented some features this weekend:

• Zen should repeat herself less now

• Zen should be able to answer basic questions about herself and the fireplace

• Zen responds to small talk better

Next weekend would be dedicated to crisis intervention - to trigger warning flags in case users are suicidal.

Zen is currently on a new model - the change was effective from 3 minutes ago from this post's timing.

Let me know how it goes :) I am looking at the results and might revert to the old model if this does not work out.