Is Your Writing Being Used to Train AI?
Galley does NOT use your writing to train AI. For other tools, the answer is in the licence grant in your tool's terms, not on its marketing page. Look for what rights you granted, whether there is an improve our services clause, and who the sub-processors are. Be sceptical of any hosted app claiming your text never leaves the server, because it has to read your text to do its job. What you can reasonably demand is a written promise, a short sub-processor list, and a working export.
It’s one of the most searched questions about writing software now, and the answer isn’t on anybody’s landing page. It’s in the licence grant in the terms of service, which almost nobody reads.
Here’s how to check any tool you use, mine included.
Find the licence grant
Open the terms of service and search for the word “licence” or “license”. You’re looking for a sentence in which you grant the company rights over your content. Something in this shape is normal and necessary:
You grant us a licence to host, store, reproduce and display your content for the purpose of operating the service.
That’s a tool saying it needs permission to put your words in a database and send them back to your screen. Without it, it can’t function.
What you’re watching for is scope creep in that same sentence. Words like “modify”, “create derivative works”, “sublicense”, “worldwide, perpetual and irrevocable”, or “in any media now known or later developed” go far beyond running a text editor. Sometimes the drafting is lazy rather than sinister. It’s still what you agreed to.
Find the improve-our-services clause
The second thing to search for is “improve”. A clause allowing a company to use your content “to improve our services” is the one doing the work in most privacy policies written before 2022, because at the time it meant crash reports and usage patterns. It now comfortably covers training a model, and nothing in the sentence has to change for that to be true.
If a tool has added AI features since you signed up, that clause is where the permission came from.
Find the sub-processor list
Under GDPR, a company processing your data has to name the other companies it passes it to. That list is usually a page called “sub-processors” linked from the privacy policy. Read it.
You’re not looking for anything scandalous. You’re counting. A short list means few places your manuscript exists. A long list with three model providers on it tells you where your prose is going, regardless of what the marketing page says about your work being yours.
If a tool has no such list, ask for one.
Be sceptical of the strongest claims
A hosted writing app can’t honestly promise that nobody could ever read your text, and you should treat it as a red flag when one does.
Galley can’t either. It reads your manuscript to build your PDF, lay out your EPUB, and run the name-consistency check. That’s server-side work on plain text. It’s not end-to-end encrypted, it can’t be while it does those things, and any tool that formats your book and claims otherwise is either wrong or using “encrypted” loosely.
So what protects you is a promise in writing, a short list of who else touches the data, and being able to leave with everything.
What I do, so you can hold me to it
Nothing in Galley writes, rewrites, suggests or completes a sentence. Nothing in it trains on your book, not to improve a model and not to improve Galley. There is no model provider in the stack to send your prose to. That matters more than the policy, because a policy can be changed in an update.
The tools that do exist count, check and typeset: overused words, name consistency, hyphenation, page counts. None of them generate.
And the part that makes the rest credible: you can export everything at any time, in open formats, including the whole book and its story bible as one zip. The short version of all of this is on your work is safe.
Credit where it’s due
I’m not the only one with a position on this. Novlr is writer-owned and has been publicly anti-AI for years. The Novel Factory is AI-free and has deeper plotting tools than I do.
Two more are worth knowing about. Novelium shares the rule that AI must not write your prose, and then uses AI to read your manuscript and check it, and says so clearly. Sudowrite is openly an AI that writes prose with you. It tells you so on the homepage, so you can choose it knowing what it does.
The short version
Don’t ask a company whether it trains on your writing. Ask what its terms permit it to do, count its sub-processors, and check you can get your manuscript out. The first can change with a product update, and the other two are much harder to change.
The no-AI position · Why Galley will never put AI in your prose · Philosophy
More on galley
- Galley for Self-PublishingWhat self-publishing a novel in Galley involves: a print-ready interior PDF, a valid EPUB, a tuned file per store, and two checks that run before you upload to KDP.
- Galley for Traditional PublishingQuerying agents or working with an editor: standard manuscript format, the submission package, watermarked beta drafts, and getting an editor's Word comments back where they belong.
- Why Galley Will Never Put AI in Your ProseAI writing tools are everywhere. Galley has none in your manuscript: nothing that writes, rewrites or suggests, and nothing trained on your words. Here's why.