How to Use AI Safely and Responsibly: A Practical Checklist

Using AI safely and responsibly comes down to four habits: keep sensitive information out of your prompts, check the privacy and training settings of every tool you use, verify what the AI tells you before acting on it, and stay alert to scams that use AI to impersonate people. Below is a practical, step-by-step version of that advice, based on guidance from government cyber agencies and the AI providers themselves.

Settings and policies change often, so treat the specific menus mentioned here as accurate as of November 2026 and double-check them in the tool you use.

Why “safe and responsible” AI use matters

Chatbots and AI assistants are now built into search engines, phones, office software and browsers. That makes them convenient, but it also means you’re constantly handing text, files and sometimes voice or images to a third-party service.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) puts the core risk plainly in its post ChatGPT and large language models: what’s the risk?: if you send information to an external provider for processing, you should assume it can be stored. The NCSC also points out that the company running a service could later be acquired by an organisation with a different approach to privacy than the one you originally agreed to.

The other half of “responsible” is about output. AI systems can produce confident, wrong answers, and the people around you (colleagues, clients, readers) are affected when you pass those answers on without checking.

Step 1: Mind your inputs

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) lists “Mind Your Inputs” as the first tip in its Secure Our World: Using AI tip sheet. The reasoning: AI systems can learn from what users type, so private material doesn’t belong in a prompt.

Before you paste anything into an AI tool, ask whether you’d be comfortable with it being stored on someone else’s servers. As a rule, leave out:

1. Personal identifiers: ID numbers, full addresses, dates of birth, account numbers.
2. Passwords, API keys and login codes: never paste these, even to “debug” something.
3. Confidential work material: client data, unreleased financials, internal documents, source code you don’t have permission to share.
4. Other people’s private information: health details, messages or photos of friends, family or customers.

If you need help with a document that contains sensitive details, replace names and numbers with placeholders (“Client A”, “£X”) before pasting it in.

At work, follow your organisation’s rules

Many employers now restrict which AI tools staff may use. Ireland’s NCSC, for example, recommends in its guidance for public sector bodies that access to generative AI tools be restricted by default and allowed only for approved uses. If your workplace has an approved tool or an AI policy, use that rather than a personal account. Business and enterprise versions of AI products often come with different data terms than consumer versions.

Step 2: Check the privacy and training settings

Most major chatbots let you control whether your conversations are used to train future models. The NCSC advises reading a service’s terms of use and privacy policy so you understand how your data is used and shared, and Singapore’s cyber and media regulators made a similar point in a 2026 advisory for individuals, steering people toward reputable services with clear privacy policies and attention to whether user data is used for training (summary from Baker McKenzie).

Using ChatGPT as an example, OpenAI’s Data Controls FAQ describes these options:

1. On the web, open your account menu, go to Settings, then Data controls, and switch off Improve the model for everyone. On mobile, open the sidebar, tap your profile icon and go to Data controls.
2. If you’re signed in, the setting follows your account across devices. If you use ChatGPT signed out, it’s saved only in that browser.
3. For one-off sensitive questions, use Temporary Chat. OpenAI says temporary chats don’t appear in your history, don’t create memories and aren’t used to train its models, but may be kept for up to 30 days for safety purposes.

A few caveats from the same help pages are worth knowing:

• Turning the training toggle off affects new conversations; it doesn’t delete existing chats.
• Giving feedback (such as a thumbs up or down) may allow the whole conversation tied to that feedback to be used for training.
• OpenAI says it doesn’t train on content from its Business, Enterprise and Edu workspaces by default.

Other assistants have their own equivalents, usually under a “privacy” or “data” section of settings. Look for three things: whether chats train the model, how long chats are kept, and how to delete your history.

Step 3: Verify what the AI tells you

CISA’s tip sheet describes AI as a tool and advises keeping your own expertise rather than relying solely on AI-generated content. In practice:

• Check facts, figures and dates against an original source before you repeat them.
• Open the links and citations an AI gives you. Make sure they exist and actually say what the AI claims.
• Be especially careful with high-stakes topics: medical, legal, financial and safety questions deserve a qualified human or an authoritative source.
• Disclose AI use where it matters: at school, at work or in published writing, follow the rules on whether and how AI assistance must be acknowledged.

Watch for manipulated output

The UK NCSC has flagged “prompt injection” as a significant risk: attackers can hide instructions in web pages, documents or emails that an AI tool then reads and follows, which can push it toward misleading answers or scams. If an AI assistant that’s summarising a page or email suddenly urges you to click a link, call a number or share details, treat that as a red flag.

Step 4: Protect yourself from AI-powered scams

Responsible use also means recognising when AI is being used against you. CISA’s tip sheet warns that criminals use AI to impersonate people, and the NCSC has noted that AI can help scammers write convincing phishing emails, including in multiple languages.

Voice cloning is a well-documented example. In a consumer alert covered by NPR, the US Federal Trade Commission warned that a scammer may need only a short audio clip of a family member’s voice, which can come from content posted online, plus a voice-cloning program, to fake an emergency call. The FTC has also stated in a formal comment on voice cloning that there is no AI exception to consumer protection law.

Your defences are mostly old-fashioned:

1. Hang up and call back on a number you already know belongs to the person, as the FTC recommends.
2. Agree on a family code word for genuine emergencies (a common precaution, though not something the FTC alert above prescribes).
3. Use the basics CISA highlights: strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, keeping software updated and reporting phishing. CISA says these matter even more now that attackers use AI.

Quick reference: safe vs. risky AI habits

The bottom line

You don’t need to avoid AI to stay safe. Treat every prompt as something that might be stored, set your privacy controls once and recheck them when apps update, verify before you trust, and stay sceptical of urgent requests, especially ones that sound like someone you know. Official guidance from agencies such as CISA and the NCSC is updated periodically, so it’s worth revisiting their pages as AI tools keep changing.