One Tech Tip: Don't want chatbots using your conversations for AI training? Some let you opt out

LONDON (AP) — Be careful what you tell a chatbot. Your conversation might be used to improve the artificial intelligence system that it's built on.

If you ask ChatGPT for advice about your embarrassing medical condition, beware that anything you disclose could be used to tweak OpenAI's algorithms that underpin its AI models. The same goes if, for example, you upload a sensitive company report to Google’s Gemini to summarize for a meeting.

It's no secret that the AI models underpinning popular chatbots have been trained on enormous troves of information scraped from the internet, like blog posts, news articles and social media comments, so they can predict the next word when coming up with a response to your question.

This training was often done without consent, raising copyright concerns. and, experts say, given the opaque nature of AI models, it's probably too late to remove any of your data that might have been used.