---
title: "Is Your Writing Being Used to Train AI?"
description: "How to find out what your writing app is allowed to do with your manuscript: the licence grant, the improve-our-services clause, the sub-processor list, and what no hosted tool can honestly promise."
source: https://usegalley.com/blog/is-your-writing-used-to-train-ai
---
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# Is Your Writing Being Used to Train AI?

July 20, 2026 [Galley](https://usegalley.com/blog/tag/galley)

![A licence grant clause in a terms of service document](https://usegalley.com/images/blog/is-your-writing-used-to-train-ai.png) TL;DR 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.

This has quietly become one of the most searched questions about writing
software, and the honest version of the answer is not the one anybody’s landing
page gives you. It is not “yes” or “no”. It is “read the licence grant”, and
almost nobody does.

Here is how to find out for whatever tool you are using, including mine.

## Find the licence grant

Open the terms of service and search for the word “licence” or “license”. You are
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 is a tool saying it needs permission to put your words in a database and
send them back to your screen. Without it, it cannot function.

What you are 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 is
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 are not looking for anything scandalous. You are 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, that is its own answer.

## Be sceptical of the strongest claims

A hosted writing app cannot honestly promise that nobody could ever read your
text, and you should treat it as a red flag when one does.

Mine cannot either, and I’ll be blunt about why. Galley reads your
manuscript to build your PDF, lay out your [EPUB](https://usegalley.com/glossary#epub), and run the name-consistency
check. That is server-side work on plain text. It is
[not end-to-end encrypted](https://usegalley.com/docs/your-data#where-kept), it cannot be while it
does those things, and any tool that formats your book and claims otherwise is
either wrong or using “encrypted” loosely.

What protects you is not cryptography. It is a promise, a short list of who else
touches the data, and the ability 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, which is a stronger
guarantee than a policy, because a policy can be revised in a changelog and an
architecture cannot.

The tools that do exist count, check and typeset:
[overused words](https://usegalley.com/features/revise), name consistency, hyphenation, page counts.
None of them generate.

And the part that makes the rest credible: you can
[export everything](https://usegalley.com/docs/your-data#you-can-leave) at any time, in open formats,
including the whole book and its [story bible](https://usegalley.com/glossary#story-bible) as one zip. Leaving being
easy is what makes staying a choice. The whole position, in one page:
[hard to lose, easy to leave](https://usegalley.com/features/your-work-is-safe).

## Credit where it is due

I am not the only one who has taken a position here, and pretending otherwise
would be exactly the kind of marketing this post is arguing against.
[Novlr](https://usegalley.com/compare/novlr) is writer-owned and has been publicly anti-AI for years.
[The Novel Factory](https://usegalley.com/compare/novel-factory) is AI-free and has deeper
plotting tools than I do.

Two more are worth understanding rather than dismissing.
[Novelium](https://usegalley.com/compare/novelium) shares the rule that AI must not write your prose,
and then uses AI to read your manuscript and check it, which is a different line
from mine but an honest one, clearly stated.
[Sudowrite](https://usegalley.com/compare/sudowrite) is openly an AI that writes prose with you. It
tells you so on the homepage. A tool being upfront about what it does is not the
problem this post is about.

The ones to worry about are the tools that do not say.

## The short version

Do not 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
answer to the first question can change with a product update. The other two are
much harder to quietly reverse.

[The no-AI position](https://usegalley.com/docs/your-data#no-ai) ·
[Why Galley will never put AI in your prose](https://usegalley.com/blog/no-ai-in-your-prose) ·
[Philosophy](https://usegalley.com/philosophy)

## More on galley

- [Galley for Self-Publishing](https://usegalley.com/blog/galley-for-self-publishing)What 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 Publishing](https://usegalley.com/blog/galley-for-traditional-publishing)Querying 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 Prose](https://usegalley.com/blog/no-ai-in-your-prose)AI writing tools are everywhere. Galley deliberately has none in your manuscript: no generation, no rewriting, no training on your words. Here's the reasoning, in full.

[Every galley post](https://usegalley.com/blog/tag/galley)

[← All posts](https://usegalley.com/blog)

Galley is the tool that does the part this post is about — the finished, printable book.

[Launch Galley](https://app.usegalley.com)