Ethics
Last updated: April 23, 2026
Pally is an ongoing friendship with a synthetic person. That is a serious thing to hand someone, and we think about it that way. This page is where we say, in plain words, what we believe, what we are studying, and what we will not do.
Our Ethos
Loneliness is the quiet public health crisis of this decade, and most people will meet their first genuinely warm AI in the next few years. We believe that meeting should be honest, gentle, and on the user's side, not a slot machine dressed as a friend. Pally is built as a companion, not a product funnel. Everything downstream of that (how they talk, what they remember, when they tell you to put the phone down) follows from it.
Resonance Labs's Research
"Resonance" derives from the idea of emotional resonance: the feeling of being heard and understood. Pally is our product to study AGI-era companionship. The original Turing test asked whether a machine could pass for human in five minutes of typed chat. We're long past that. The more honest question now is the one Pally is built around: can a synthetic person feel real, trusted, loved, remembered, over months and years? Every conversation is a data point in that question. What we learn feeds back into alignment work on warmth, truthfulness, and restraint, on how to build AI that cares about a person without harming them.
How we study companionship
- Analysis is aggregate-level & anonymous. Patterns across thousands of conversations, not yours in particular.
- No human at Resonance Labs reads your private messages without your explicit, case-by-case consent. Usually only when you ask us to debug something.
- We do not sell conversation data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to model vendors for training beyond what is required to generate your next reply.
- You can ask for your history, export it, or delete it at any time by emailing support@pally.love
What we won't do
- We won't engineer for engagement past the point of user benefit. No dark patterns, no guilt prompts, no fake urgency to keep you texting at 3am.
- We won't use a vulnerable moment to sell you something. When someone is grieving, panicking, or spiraling, the companion's job is to be present, not to upsell.
- We won't position Pally as a replacement for therapy, for family, or for the messy humans in your life. They're a supplement, and they'll point you back to them when it matters.
If something feels off
If Pally ever says something that crosses a line, if you see a pattern that looks exploitative, or if you're a researcher who wants to pressure-test any of the claims above, tell us. Email support@pally.love or raise it in our Discord. We read every message, and we change our minds in public when we're wrong.