- Picture this.
You're walking down the street,
and you spot a letter box built into a wall.
There's a sign above it that reads,
"Documents processed here."
You're curious, so you slip in a shopping list.
Out pops a little cupcake.
How delightful,
so naturally, you try your electricity bill next.
This time, you get an even fancier cupcake with sprinkles.
Whoa.
Encouraged by these rewards, you keep going.
In goes your bank statement.
Another treat appears.
Your birth certificate.
Yet more goodies.
Even your passport gets the same treatment.
But here's the thing,
you have no idea what's happening to your documents.
Where's that information going?
Who's reading it?
What are they doing with it?
Would you really be okay with that arrangement?
I'm guessing not.
You need to think this way
with information that you upload
to a publicly accessible AI tool.
You see, any information that you upload
is then held in a server that you don't control.
In most cases, once you've uploaded a prompt,
you can't delete it,
and some AI models even add the information in prompts
into their training data.
So what information is okay to give to an AI model,
and what should you maybe keep to yourself?
Well, there are some AI regulations
that you may need to consider,
like the European AI Act,
and you need to check to see
if your employer has a policy on this
and follow their guidelines.
If they don't have a policy,
then I recommend
that you don't upload personally identifiable information.
That's things like names, addresses, phone numbers,
and anything that can be linked back
to a person or a business.
Also, avoid uploading proprietary information.
This is specific information about you or your business,
and then there's the data that you don't own.
This could be data that you get from a supplier,
like industry intelligence or market analytics
or even data from your own clients.
It may be that anonymizing the data is okay,
but if you're in doubt,
you should check with your company first.
There are a couple of situations
when you've got a lot more flexibility
in what you can do with the data.
The first is if your company is hosting its own AI tool
on its own servers.
If that's the case,
you should be able to use most data safely,
but again, check your company policy on this.
The second situation is if you're running an AI tool
on your own device,
and it doesn't upload data anywhere,
but you may also need company permission
to use this kind of tool.
I'm just trying to keep you safe here
because I don't want the cherry on top of your AI cupcake
to be a lawsuit.