There are a lot of AI powered daily journals out there right now. All offer some variation of analyzing your writing and detecting emotions. Which supposedly helps you understand your emotions better. Writing and journaling are a time-tested ways of making yourself productive. AI, or rather LLMs, can help with unblocking your writing. The real question is - what is the cost? I hope this post will at least help you ask some important questions before using those products.
First obvious cost in 99% of cases, all your information is not encrypted. That means that employees of the software provider you are using can read any of your journals. While that is a normal part of using the vast majority of services in 2024. Should you give all your innermost thoughts freely to some company you don’t know much about? Are you 100% sure they won’t leak your data because of engineering bug? Or that they won’t sell your data?
While this seems like unnecessary complications. Reality is that journaling only works if you can be 100% brutally honest with yourself. Once you put your real thoughts outside your head, you gain a new perspective. But how can you be honest if you don’t own the “paper” you are writing on? Here, the paper is the database in which your data is stored.
Some of those apps say on their website that all your data is encrypted. But is it really? If you look closer at privacy policy or terms of service, there is no mention of encryption anywhere. Just a vague MidJourney generated image, and a text written by a skilled copywriter. Both are there to address your concerns. Actual question should be is it encrypted only in transit? Or do they offer full end-to-end encryption, where everything is encrypted at rest?
Second cost is that most of these apps under the hood use cloud LLMs. So everything you write they send to servers of those companies. Are you sure you can trust BigTech with this data? They all have nice fancy privacy policies, but do they actually follow them? One quick search can find a lot of examples of how they gathered their training data. Can you trust them? Do you want your personal info inside the LLMs?
Obviously, there are benefits. You get a personal helper that helps you process issues. If you are feeling completely down, the benefits might outpace the costs. But we have direct evidence that companies in mental health space have abused that trust. Many times. Quick search for “mental health company scam” will give you enough anxiety for days.
Personally, I would never use any of those services, and I don’t think you should either. There are many text editors and ways to encrypt your data locally. That might be more of a chore to set up, but you control your own data. If you use some cloud software for this, at least read how they store the data. Apart from taking care of your physical health, learning how to write your thoughts is the most important thing you can do. All aspects of your life will improve after you put it out on a page. Just probably not on some random cloud app.