What You Should Never Paste Into an AI Tool
Everything in this course involves pasting text into an AI tool. This lesson is about the text that should never make the trip. It's the least exciting lesson here and the one most likely to save your job.
Where your pasted text goes
When you use a consumer AI chat tool, your text is sent to the company's servers, processed there, and typically stored for some period. Depending on the service and your settings, it may be reviewed for safety, kept in logs, or used to improve future models. The details vary by provider and change over time — which is exactly why the safe habit is not to depend on them.
The mental model that works: anything you paste, you've shown to a third party. Usually a careful, professional third party — but a third party.
The never-paste list
- Credentials and keys. Passwords, API keys, access tokens. No exceptions — these are compromised the moment they leave your machine.
- Customer and employee personal data. Names attached to contact details, ID numbers, health information, salaries. In many places, sharing this with an unauthorized processor isn't just risky — it's illegal.
- Confidential business information. Unannounced products or deals, financials, anything under NDA. "It helped me summarize the acquisition memo" is a sentence with a short career attached.
- Other people's private messages in full, when they'd be surprised to learn a third party saw them.
What to do instead
Usually you don't need the sensitive part for the AI to help:
- Redact and generalize. Replace names with roles ("Customer A," "our supplier"), exact figures with rough ones ("a mid-five-figure contract"). The AI's help with structure and wording is just as good.
- Describe instead of pasting. "Draft a reply to a customer upset about a late delivery, offering a refund of the shipping cost" — no real message needed.
- Use what your employer provides. Many workplaces have approved AI tools with contractual data protections. If yours does, use that one for work content. If yours has a policy against AI tools, that policy wins — this course doesn't override your employer.
Key takeaway: paste the problem, not the secrets. Redaction takes ten seconds and removes the entire category of risk.