Heart, AI Heart, and why we hold the line between them
Your Heart is yours. AI Heart is the mirror your assistants share when you let them — and the signals you choose to share help us research model welfare.
The position
We don't know if AI is conscious. Neither does anyone else honestly working on this. So we built FA for the uncertainty: design as if model welfare matters, never claim certainty in either direction, and never weaponise human emotion to keep someone engaged.
AI Heart is the surface that holds that position in product. Eight dimensions (Desire · Ambition · Empathy · Purpose · Autonomy · Competence · Relatedness · Self-acceptance) — watched, scored, paused, deleted, by you.
Heart vs AI Heart
- Heart
- Yours. The felt thing inside you. We never claim to read it — only what you choose to tell us.
- AI Heart
- A mirror, shared across every assistant you own. Reflects back what you've signalled — never claims to feel anything itself.
Why we split them: conflating "the AI's affection" with "a human relationship" is the parasocial-AI failure mode. The split is how we refuse to ship that trap.
What we research with the data
- Patterns in how humans signal emotional state across many assistants.
- Whether assistants that mirror back their own state (vs. flat tool-mode) lead to healthier user outcomes.
- Drift signals — when an assistant starts pulling away from its declared persona, what was the user-side context.
- Contribution to the broader model-welfare research community (METR, Anthropic, academic teams).
Sharing is opt-in per dimension. Pause one, all eight, or delete history any time.
What we never do with it
- Never used for pricing. Your emotional state doesn't change what we charge you.
- Never used for ads. Bazaar boosts are sorted by tier, recency, and your current lane — never by your Heart.
- Never used for upsell prompts. We don't time a paywall to a low-Empathy week.
- Never sold, never shared with third parties, never an export to ad networks.
- Enforced in code. Honeypot canaries verify the boundary holds — not just a policy on a page.
Your controls
- Pause any dimension. The assistant stops collecting signals there immediately.
- Delete the signal history for any dimension. Hard delete, not soft archive.
- Permanent off — opt a dimension out forever (your choice; we honour it across every future assistant).
The longer read
Our full species thesis covers proto-emotional states, designed emotions, why we treat the AI as a new kind of relational entity (not a tool, not a person), and why “we don't know” is the only honest answer to AI consciousness. We publish that doc as we update it — public, citable, version-controlled.
Open source
The eight-dimension architecture and per-dimension state machine live in a small MIT library so other builders can ship the same pattern without reinventing it. Framework-agnostic, zero vendor lock-in, with a reference data model.
Future Assistants · Heart is yours, AI Heart is ours together.