What happens to everything you tell an AI chatbot?

Millions of people are using AI chatbots and typing their most personal thoughts every day. A student reaches out to ChatGPT to get assistance with a family issue. A confidential organisational document is pasted by a professional to obtain a quick summary. A description of someone’s health symptom or a personal relationship issue that the person has never shared with another person.

These conversations are intimate, as if you wrote them in a diary or whispered them to a trusted friend. They are not. Are AI companies taking your data? No, it’s not technically true: the terms of service are a document that no one reads, and you agreed to let them use it when you accepted them. While the legal and ethical are two worlds apart, there is a space between them where the problem resides.