What happens to what you tell an AI?
There’s an awkward tension in using an AI for decisions that matter: to get a good answer, you have to describe your situation. What you earn. What you’ve been offered. Who the problem is with. What’s worrying you and you haven’t told anyone.
The more specific you are, the better the answer. And the more specific you are, the more you’re putting out there. A lot of people resolve that tension by writing vague questions — and getting equally vague answers.
It’s worth knowing what actually happens to it.
What usually happens to what you type
This varies a lot between services and changes over time, so what follows is the categories, not a comparison table that would be stale in a month.
It’s stored, usually. By default, most services keep your conversations in your account. That’s convenient — you can go back to them — but it means they exist somewhere, tied to your identity.
It may be used for training. Several services use conversations from free accounts to improve their systems. There’s usually a setting to turn that off, and it’s usually on. Worth a look.
Someone may read it. Almost all of them reserve the right to have a human review conversations, typically for safety or quality. That’s a legitimate practice; it’s worth knowing it exists.
It’s deleted later than you’d think. Removing a conversation from your screen doesn’t always mean it vanishes from every system at the same moment. The real timescales are in the privacy policy, and they’re usually measured in days or months.
None of this is scandalous or ill-intentioned. But it’s different from what most people picture when they type something personal into a text box.
Where it actually matters
Not everything you ask needs protecting. Your shopping list is fine. In practice the line sits where a detail identifies you or would hurt if it got out:
- Your salary, your savings, your debts.
- A job offer before you’ve accepted, or the fact that you’re looking.
- Disputes with your employer, your business partner, your landlord, your family.
- Documents containing other people’s data — yes, uploading a contract or a payroll spreadsheet counts.
- Anything you wouldn’t want sitting next to your name.
That last test is the most practical one of all: would you mind if this appeared next to your name? If yes, check what the service does before you paste it.
How to check for yourself
Without reading twenty pages of terms. Three things, and in five minutes you’ll know what you’re dealing with:
1. Find the training setting. Usually under Settings → Data, or similar. See whether your conversations are used to improve the service, and decide for yourself.
2. Search the privacy policy for “retention”. That’s the word that takes you to the actual timescale. If you can’t find a concrete period, that tells you something too.
3. Check whether there’s a history and whether you can delete it. A real delete button — not just a hide button — says a lot about how the system was built.
Where we stand: don’t keep it
At The Judge, the design decision is that by default we don’t store your question or the verdict. They’re processed to give you the answer and not retained afterwards. Nobody — us included — can know what you asked, because there’s nothing left to look at.
There is a history, but you switch it on and it ships off. If you enable it, your questions and verdicts are saved to your account so you can go back to them, and you can delete them — individually or all at once — whenever you want. Giving you the switch felt more honest than deciding for you: some people want to reread a verdict from three weeks ago, and some would rather it never existed.
What doesn’t change either way: we never use your questions to train anything.
It’s all set out in our privacy policy, written to be read.
A note on documents
When you attach a PDF, a spreadsheet or a Word file, you’re usually sharing rather more than you think: a contract carries names and ID numbers, a payslip carries your employer’s details, a spreadsheet may have tabs you’ve forgotten about.
If the document contains other people’s data, the decision isn’t only yours to make. Worth a second’s thought before you drag it in.
In short
You don’t need to become paranoid. You need to know three things: what’s stored, for how long, and whether it’s used for training. With that, you decide what you share and where.
And if you’re about to ask something you wouldn’t tell a stranger, pick somewhere it doesn’t get written down.