When it comes to the tools that produce AI-enhanced versions of your face, for example—which seem to continue to increase in number—we wouldn't recommend using them unless you're happy with the possibility of seeing AI-generated visages like your own show up in other people's creations.

As far as text goes, steer completely clear of any personal, private, or sensitive information: We've already seen portions of chat histories leaked out due to a bug. As tempting as it might be to get ChatGPT to summarize your company's quarterly financial results or write a letter with your address and bank details in it, this is information that's best left out of these generative AI engines—not least because, as Microsoft admits, some AI prompts are manually reviewed by staff to check for inappropriate behavior.

To be fair this is something that the AI developers caution against. "Don’t include confidential or sensitive information in your Bard conversations," warns Google, while OpenAI encourages users "not to share any sensitive content" that could find it's way out to the wider web through the shared links feature. If you don't want it to ever in public or be used in an AI output, keep it to yourself.

You've decided you're OK with the privacy policy, you're making sure you're not oversharing—the final step is to explore the privacy and security controls you get inside your AI tools of choice. The good news is that most companies make these controls relatively visible and easy to operate.

Google Bard follows the lead of other Google products like Gmail or Google Maps: You can choose to have the data you give it automatically erased after a set period of time, or manually delete the data yourself, or let Google keep it indefinitely. To find the controls for Bard, head here and make your choice.

Like Google, Microsoft rolls its AI data management options in with the security and privacy settings for the rest of its products. Head here to find the privacy options for everything you do with Microsoft products, then click Search history to review (and if necessary delete) anything you've chatted with Bing AI about.

When it comes to ChatGPT on the web, click your email address (bottom left), then choose Settings and Data controls. You can stop ChatGPT from using your conversations to train its models here, but you'll lose access to the chat history feature at the same time. Conversations can also be wiped from the record by clicking the trash can icon next to them on the main screen individually, or by clicking your email address and Clear conversations and Confirm clear conversations to delete them all.