Authors: The 10-Minute Check Before Any AI Sees Your Manuscript

Ask these questions before you blindly paste your manuscript

Every AI model launch follows the same script.

The tool drops, the demos look incredible, your feed fills with prompts to try, and somewhere in the excitement, thousands of writers paste in the most valuable file they own without reading a word of the paperwork.

Not because they’re careless. Because nobody ever taught them what to look for, and the documents are written for lawyers and programmers.

So today, the thing itself: the exact check I run before any model, from any company, ever sees my work. It takes about ten minutes, you only have to learn it once, and it works on every tool that exists now and every tool that launches next year.

The five questions that matter

Does a copy exist after I close the tab? Open the company’s privacy or data-retention page and Ctrl+F the words “retain,” “delete,” and “days.” You’re looking for a number. Thirty days, five years, indefinitely. Whatever it is, you want to know it before you paste, not after.

Can I turn that off? Search “opt out” and “zero data retention.” Some tools offer it to everyone, some only to business accounts, some not at all. “No opt-out” isn’t automatically a dealbreaker. It’s a trade, and trades should be made on purpose.

Is my writing training the model? Ctrl+F “train.” You want a plain sentence that says your inputs are not used for training. If you can’t find one, assume the answer you don’t want.

What happens if I get flagged? This is the one everyone misses. Retention limits usually have an exception for content flagged by safety systems, and flagged material can be held far longer, sometimes with no stated limit. Search “flag,” “review,” and “safety.” Fiction research trips these systems more than you’d think. Your villain’s poison is somebody’s classifier alert.

Whose rights are in this file? This one isn’t in the paperwork; it’s in yours. If the pages contain a client’s chapters, anything under NDA, or someone’s real medical history and family secrets, the question stops being “do I trust this company” and becomes “does my contract allow this.” Ghostwriters and memoirists, this is your whole question.

The rule that falls out of it

Once you’ve run the check a few times, you’ll notice it always lands in the same place.

Work you own outright goes wherever you decide it goes, eyes open. Work containing anyone else’s material or secrets stays out of anything with mandatory retention, full stop. And the sketchy-looking research gets done somewhere you’ve chosen deliberately, not wherever you happened to have a tab open.

Ten minutes of reading, and you’ll know a tool better than 99% of the people posting prompt lists about it.

I ran this exact check on a model this week

Fable 5 came back from its government suspension on July 1st, and it’s genuinely the strongest writing model an author can touch right now. It also failed question two and has the strangest answer to question four I’ve ever found.

I put the whole thing on screen, receipts included, in this week’s video:

And if you want the prompts, blueprints, and tools I use to test these models on real fiction, they live in my Ko-fi shop: ko-fi.com/ckokoski.

Cheers,

Christopher