Deleting AI conversations does not necessarily mean they have disappeared permanently. ORISA is a tool that can recover deleted conversations from AI applications running locally on a phone.
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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have developed a new digital forensics tool that demonstrates that deleting conversations with AI-powered chatbots does not necessarily erase them completely.
The tool, called ORISA, can extract deleted conversations from a phone’s memory and reconstruct them as interactive chat sessions, allowing users to continue communicating with the AI assistant.
How does ORISA recover deleted AI conversations?
Running AI assistants locally on a phone may seem like a more private option because conversations are not sent to cloud servers. However, this data remains in the phone’s working memory while the application is running, meaning that deleting a conversation from the app’s interface does not necessarily erase it from memory.
ORISA searches for remaining fragments of deleted conversation data, then collects and reconstructs them to create an active, usable AI session.
In one experiment, the researchers created a virtual assistant called “Project Note Keeper” and supplied it with 100 pieces of information before deleting the entire conversation.
Because of the model’s limited context window, the assistant could access only 14 of those facts when the conversation was deleted.
However, ORISA successfully recovered 26 facts, more than the original model could access in its active session at the time of deletion.
Although the tool could not recover all the information shared in the conversation, the results demonstrated its ability to extract data beyond what had been available to the model during the original session.
The researchers conducted 60 tests under different configurations, involving 10 Android applications and three different AI models. The tool successfully recovered data from deleted conversations across these tests.
Why is this tool important?
The researchers believe ORISA could help digital forensic investigators reconstruct conversations people have had with AI assistants, including the information they shared and the advice they received. This could make the tool valuable in digital forensic investigations.
It could also help investigate cases in which AI chatbot advice is suspected of causing harm to patients, particularly when patients have not shared details of those conversations with their doctors.
At the same time, this capability raises privacy concerns for users of AI applications that run locally on their devices, as deleting conversations may not permanently remove their data as users expect.
For now, ORISA is a digital forensics tool designed for investigators, rather than a conventional application that anyone can use to recover deleted conversations.
Using it also requires access to a copy of the phone’s memory and storage. Recovery becomes more difficult when other activities on the device overwrite the remaining data from previous conversations.
Nevertheless, the study highlights the amount of data that locally run AI applications may retain in device memory without users being aware of it.
