Work · what's safe to share
Pasting work into AI
30-second gist~30s read
A short rule that holds in most workplaces: if you'd email it to a stranger outside your company, you can paste it into a public AI. If you wouldn't, don't.
The most common quiet career-damage in 2025-26 has been from people pasting confidential information into a free AI account. The data isn't always the issue — sometimes the audit trail is.
If you want more
What's almost always fine to paste
- Public-facing copy you're editing for your website.
- Sample data with names removed.
- Drafts of internal documents that don't contain customer or financial data.
- Code that's already open-source.
- Your own notes, your own writing, things you'd happily blog.
What to never paste into a public AI
- Customer data with names, emails, phone numbers, account details.
- Internal source code (especially anything with API keys or secrets).
- Pre-release financials, board papers, M&A documents.
- Anything covered by an NDA — yours or someone else's.
- Patient health information, legal advice from your lawyer, HR records.
The middle ground
If your company has an enterprise AI (Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Workspace AI, an internal ChatGPT Enterprise, an Azure OpenAI deployment) — use that for confidential work. Enterprise AIs typically don't train on your data and the data stays inside your tenant. The "don't paste this" list shrinks dramatically when the AI is contractually inside your company's boundary.
Lessons that teach this
Plain AI Curriculum lessons that anchor on this topic — short reads with practice, free under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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What you can paste into AI — and what you really shouldn'tAfter this lesson, you'll have a one-sentence rule for what's safe to paste into a public AI — and a clear understanding of how that rule changes when your company gives you an enterprise tool.
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When AI is in your meetings, and when to say it helpedAfter this lesson, you'll be able to recognise when AI is taking notes in your meetings and decide whether to keep it on — and you'll have a one-sentence rule for when to say AI helped with your work.
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"Will AI replace me?" — the honest answerAfter this lesson, you'll have an honest, non-doomer, non-cheerleader picture of what AI is shifting in your work — and one habit that protects your career through the change.
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Two conversations at workWalk away with two short conversations to have this week — one with yourself (a paste-rule audit for your role), one with your manager (a 5-minute disclosure check-in). Both pull from lessons 1-4.
Across Plain AI · what's changing in AI
No direct updates yet for this topic — here's what's changing more broadly.
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OpenAI launched GPT-5.5
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AI tutor data came in — Khanmigo's first real-world results
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Meta released Llama 5