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The free tool below runs entirely in this browser — no account, nothing stored or transmitted. Redact anything you would not want kept before you type it.
Open the companion tool →Why ownership, license, and training are three different things
Most terms say you keep ownership of what you upload and separately grant the company a license to use it to operate and improve the service. Those are separate sentences, and the second one is the one that matters.
The training question is its own clause: whether your content can be used to improve models, whether that applies to free and paid tiers differently, and whether you can opt out. Uploading client work or someone else's creative material can also breach your own obligations to them.
The protocol
- Find the license section and read what it permits: operating the service, improving it, training models, sublicensing, or displaying your content.
- Check whether the license ends when you delete the content, or continues for material already used in training. Those are different and the terms usually say so.
- Check whether the paid tier changes the training clause — some tools only train on free-tier content.
- Confirm you have the right to upload what you are uploading: client material, other people's photos, and material under contract may be off limits regardless of the tool's terms.
- Decide your upload rule: what never goes into a consumer AI tool — identity documents, medical images, client files, unpublished work under contract.
What the tool does
Work through what an AI tool's terms say about uploads: what you keep, what you grant, and whether training use applies. It stores nothing and sends nothing.
Limit first: This is a terms-reading aid, not legal advice. Licenses differ by product, plan, and jurisdiction, and they change.
Open the companion tool →One human next step
If you have uploaded material you did not have the right to share, tell the person or client involved before they discover it another way, and ask the tool to delete it in writing. For contractual material, your own agreement usually sets the deadline for that conversation.
Research log and safety checks
AI-assist path: not used for a verdict. Ownership, license, and training are distinct clauses the reader can locate and quote; the artifact's value is the separation, not an interpretation of the contract. §6.10: not a frontier-pace topic.
§0.5 protection result: category is informed-consent-literacy; crisis-adjacent: no; fear/urgency/scarcity toolkit used: no. The protective function is free and the paid feature is convenience only.