Responsible use
Safety · topic safety/responsible-use
Using AI responsibly means knowing what may go into a prompt and what may not, respecting the confidentiality of other people's information, honouring the licenses of material you feed in and produce, and telling your audience when AI helped where they would expect to know.
Concepts
- Data privacy
- Personal data or source code pasted into a prompt leaves your control. Where it goes is set by the tool's terms: how long the provider retains it, whether it may train on it, where it is stored and where it is processed, and which subprocessors it passes through. A tool built on a gateway built on a model vendor has three such policies. Remove or replace names, contact details, health or financial information and anything covered by privacy law unless the tool is approved for it. glossary
- Confidentiality
- Information you are trusted to keep inside a boundary: customer contracts, unreleased plans, source code, colleagues' conversations. Pasting it into an AI tool is a disclosure to a third party, even if nobody reads it. The test is whether you would email the same text to that provider; if not, summarize, redact or use a sanctioned tool. glossary
- Licensing and attribution
- Material you give a model and material it produces both carry obligations. Feeding in copyrighted text or code you may not redistribute does not remove the restriction on it, and output that reproduces a source needs the same attribution the source demands. Keep track of where inputs came from and check that output which looks copied is credited or replaced. glossary
- Disclosure
- Saying that AI was used, to the extent the audience expects. A reader of a report, a reviewer of code or a party to a contract generally wants to know whether a machine drafted the text and who checked it. Disclosure is about trust, not shame: state what the AI did, what you did, and who is accountable for the result. glossary
Links
- Builds on: Capabilities and limits
- Leads to: nothing yet
- Competencies drawing on it: Uses AI safely with confidential and personal data
Lessons
- Redacting a document before you paste it (tutorial)
- What may go into an AI tool (explanation)
- Saying that AI helped, and crediting what it copied (tutorial)
Your reference
Each lesson above adds its takeaways and its example here once you finish it. Your reference lists every lesson you have finished.
Redacting a document before you paste it
Unlocks when you finish Redacting a document before you paste it.
Takeaways
- Read the document with the task in mind and split it in two: the facts the task uses, and the details that say who is involved. The reply to a leak needs the leak and the departure time. It doesn't need the identifiers.
- Replace each identifier with a placeholder that keeps its role,
Person 1,Person 2,[account number], and use the same placeholder everywhere the value appears. - The task works as well on the redacted text. Most tasks read the facts of a document, and the identifiers are there for the people who file and answer it.
- A partial redaction that leaves an initial, a city or an account number in the subject line is a redaction of nothing. Check the subject line and the signature.
- Keep the redaction map outside the tool, where the original is kept, and use it to put the names back into the answer. Send what the task needs and no more.
Example
Draft a short reply to the customer email between the triple quotes. Apologize, offer a free second visit this week, and ask for two time windows that suit them. Keep the placeholders exactly as written.
""" [the redacted email, pasted in full] """
Dear Person 1,
Thank you for letting us know, and I am sorry the leak came back so soon after Person 2's visit. We would like to send a technician again this week, and we pay for the visit. Could you give us two time windows that suit you, outside your morning departure? Until then, please keep the water supply to the dishwasher closed.
Kind regards, Norrbeck Appliances customer support
What may go into an AI tool
Unlocks when you finish What may go into an AI tool.
Takeaways
- A prompt is processed on the provider's servers under the tool's terms. Retention, training, region and the chain of subprocessors are facts to look up for your own tool, once, and write down for your team.
- Web search sends a derived query to a separate provider with its own terms. Keep sensitive detail out of prompts that search, or turn search off.
- Sort information into four tiers by asking whose it is and what role you hold. Information you hold for someone else is theirs to decide about.
- Personal data stays out unless the tool is approved for it. Secrets stay out of every tool, and a pasted secret is a leaked secret.
- Experimenting with dummy data needs no approval. It ends the moment anything real appears, and moving up needs an owner.
- Say that AI helped, to the extent the audience expects, and check output that looks copied before you use it.
Example
This lesson has no runnable example or prompt block.
Saying that AI helped, and crediting what it copied
Unlocks when you finish Saying that AI helped, and crediting what it copied.
Takeaways
- Say that AI helped when the reader would judge the work differently knowing it. A translation, a generated function or a drafted summary gets the line. Accepted spelling corrections don't.
- The line has three parts: what the AI did, what you checked, and who is accountable. A bare "written with AI" answers none of the reader's questions.
- Output that reproduces a source carries the source's license. A permissive license asks for its notice to stay with the copy. A copyleft license asks more than a notice, and then the copy is replaced by your own work.
- When output looks more finished than the request, search for a phrase from it. A line-by-line comparison puts a number on the match, and the function name changing while the comments stay is the usual pattern.
- Find the disclosure rule of the place the work goes to (a journal, a project, an employer, or the law) and follow it. When there is none, use the three parts and ask.
Example
How many lines match? · open in the lesson
Before you run it, write down what the script prints.
python3 compare.pyPrints the lines below (verified in CI from site/examples/safety/saying-ai-helped/compare.py)
9 of 10 lines of generated.py also appear in library/truncate.py only in generated.py: def shorten(text, limit, marker="..."):
Sources
DLAI-2Generative AI for Everyone, DeepLearning.AI (course)Academy ai-fluency-framework-foundationsAI Fluency: Framework and foundations, Claude Academy (course)