Chat · guides

AI chatbot: what it does with what you type

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated · 5 min read

This is the entrance to the ai chatbot tower — the assistants themselves, what each one is actually good at, the ways all of them fail, and what it takes to run one on hardware you own.

The tower is built around a distinction that most coverage skips. There is the question of which assistant to use, which changes every few months and is the subject of endless argument. And there is the question of how to use any of them well, which barely changes at all and determines almost everything about whether they are useful to you. This building will hold both, and only the second keeps its value for more than a season.

Anything written here about a particular assistant will be dated rather than definitive. What each model can do moves quickly, a page claiming a ranking is out of date within a season, and the useful thing to offer is a description of what a service says it does, what it costs, what it does with your conversations, and when that was last checked.

These systems fail in a specific and consistent way, and it is worth saying so at the door: fluently. A wrong answer arrives in the same confident register as a right one, with no signal distinguishing them, and that is a property of the technology rather than a bug awaiting a fix. Anything written here about accuracy will be about recognising where the risk is highest and building the habit of checking.

Two wings are open today. The first is about privacy, which is the question people ask last and should ask first. What a service does with what you type into it varies enormously between products and between the free and paid tiers of the same product, it is written down, and it is worth reading.

Three levels are planned, and you are on the first. Five guides exist so far — whether ChatGPT is safe, who owns it, Go against Plus, deleting your history, and whether it can analyse a video — and they are linked below. The rest of the map is written out here as a plan: as each floor arrives it will cover one subject completely and hold the shorter guides underneath it, and nothing will be more than three clicks from the front door.

Where to start

Five ways in. The first is the question people ask last and should ask first.

“Is my conversation being used for training?”
That is what happens to what you type
“Is ChatGPT safe to use?”
Four different questions wear that word: Is ChatGPT safe? What OpenAI publishes
“What does the paid tier actually add?”
The two pages compared, in ChatGPT Go vs Plus, and the line about ads
“I want the conversations gone.”
What deleting really does is in How to delete ChatGPT history
“Will a checker say my writing is AI?”
That is a different building: AI detector, humanisers and plagiarism

What happens to what you type

The privacy wing, where what gets quoted is the service’s own published position with the date, because these settings change and the defaults differ between tiers.

Is ChatGPT safe?Four different questions wear that word. The two OpenAI documents, quoted, and the two it cannot answer.Open this guide → Who owns itThree shareholdings, none a majority — and the largest one does not carry control.Open this guide → Go or PlusOne raises limits, the other opens doors — and only one of the two pages mentions ads.Open this guide → Deleting your historyWhat archiving and deleting actually do, the thirty-day window, and the connected-app trap.Open this guide →

What it can and cannot do

The second wing: what a service says it will accept, in its own words and with the day it was read.

Can ChatGPT analyze videosFour routes in, one of them a video file, and OpenAI’s own warning about how complete the analysis is.Open this guide →

Not covered here. It will not crown a best assistant. That answer changes every few months, it depends heavily on what you do, and any page claiming otherwise is either out of date or selling something.

It will not pretend these tools are reliable narrators. The failure wing is not a disclaimer bolted on at the end — it is a quarter of the building, because using them well means using them with that in mind.

It will not tell you what a service does with your conversations without quoting the service. Those policies change, they differ between free and paid, and second-hand summaries of them are frequently a year behind.

And it will not carry affiliate links, which in this category means declining the fastest-growing referral programmes on the internet.

One closing thought about how to use this tower. If you already have an assistant and are vaguely disappointed by it, the wing to read is not the one about which product to switch to. Switching rarely fixes a disappointing experience, because the difference between a poor answer and a good one is usually on your side of the conversation rather than theirs. What holds instead is simple: every assistant floor carries the date it was checked, and no floor carries an affiliate link.

Written by Alberto Gulotta

Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.

Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.

Written on 20 August 2026 · last checked 23 September 2026.

Independence and limits

No affiliate links and no paid placements anywhere on this site. Nobody pays to appear here, and no company has seen this page before you did.

This is general information, not professional advice. Where a page touches money, health, safety or the law, it names its source and the date it was read — and your situation may still differ. See the privacy page and the cookie policy.