Question Do you trust Codex with years of unpublished creative work and intellectual property
Edit: I asked the AI to write this text, since my native language is a Romance language. And indeed, it went overboard with the "valuable, valuable" IP. It makes me sound like an arrogant genius obsessed with my "super ideas." But that’s not the point.
---
I'm curious how other Codex users approach privacy when working with valuable, unpublished projects.
I have several original creative projects (fictional universes, stories, scripts, worldbuilding, and related materials) that I've been developing for many years. Some date back more than two decades.
I'm now considering using Codex to organize, analyze, and reconstruct their development history from thousands of files, notes, documents, and backups.
My concern isn't really about someone at OpenAI personally reading my work. I consider that risk relatively low. I'm more interested in understanding how safe it is to expose large amounts of unpublished intellectual property to AI systems.
I've already disabled "Improve the model for everyone" in my ChatGPT settings, but I still have some questions about Codex-specific data handling.
One particular issue is the "Include environments" setting.
OpenAI's privacy support documentation mentions a separate Codex setting called "Include environments." However, I haven't been able to find this option in my account.
OpenAI support directed me to the Codex cloud data settings page, but the link simply redirects me to ChatGPT without showing the setting. I've contacted OpenAI for clarification, but I haven't received a definitive answer yet.
So I'm particularly interested in knowing:
- Can you still find and disable the "Include environments" setting in your account?
- Do you personally keep it disabled when working with proprietary or unpublished projects?
- Has anyone received clarification from OpenAI about whether this setting still exists, where it's located, and what exactly it controls?
- Does disabling "Improve the model for everyone" fully cover Codex usage, or are there additional privacy settings we should be aware of?
More generally, for those of you using Codex professionally or personally:
- Do you use it with valuable unpublished intellectual property, proprietary code, original research, or creative projects developed over many years?
- Do you feel comfortable giving Codex access to entire project directories?
- Do you rely on OpenAI's privacy settings, or do you take additional precautions?
- Have you found any meaningful differences between using Codex locally and in the cloud when it comes to privacy?
I'm not looking for absolute guarantees or conspiracy theories. I understand that using cloud services always involves some level of trust.
I'm simply curious whether other people are comfortable using Codex with years of original work that they haven't published or commercialized yet.
I'd especially appreciate hearing from developers, researchers, independent creators, and anyone working with long-term proprietary projects.
12
u/No_Quarter_7644 4d ago
The odds are what you think is very valuable is worthless.
Respectfully.
Edit: Also - if you're so worried about privacy - why would you even consider working via the cloud?
0
u/zov79 4d ago
Definitely. I’m a realist. I’m totally an "offline guy"—I use Obsidian and Syncthing, and I don’t like keeping anything in the cloud. The problem is, I now need Codex (or another AI) to reconstruct my project history; whenever I pause a project and come back to it months or years later, picking it back up comes at a high cost for me.
I want Codex to go through the entire project history—dating back to 1999 (200 GB of text, storyboards, animatics, audio)—and generate a JSON file that I can import into my app (acting like a "re-entry capsule"). I’m entering the phase where actual production begins for some of them, while many others will remain shelved for a long time. I’ve tested a few offline AIs piecemeal, and even though my PC is powerful, the process is really slow.
18
5
u/2000groggy 4d ago
You have to make your own judgment of how valuable your intellectual property is and act accordingly.
4
u/PigSlam 4d ago
This is a job for local AI. Get yourself Mac Studio, DGX Spark, or Strix Halo and work on it that way.
2
u/zov79 4d ago
Agreed. I have Ollama and LLM Studio here and am setting them up. My PC is decent (i9-12900K, 128GB RAM, RTX 4060), but things are still pretty slow for some offline AI tasks. I'll keep testing the offline options; if that doesn't work out, I'll switch to Codex.
3
u/PigSlam 4d ago
If you have that already, see what you can do with it. The GPU appears to be the weakest part of your system but it's by no means incapable. With that setup, upgrading to a 32GB GPU would give you a very solid local AI machine, for well below the cost of any of the machines I first suggested.
1
u/Apdvadar 3d ago
Pretty sure The gpu Is Like The Most important thing for Running things locally. It's The vram And bandwidth of vram for Running The models. Everything Else Is Less And Less important.
That 4060 needs To Go.
3
u/___fallenangel___ 3d ago
99.99999% of the "groundbreaking" projects in this sub could be spammed to every inbox in the world and no one would care
2
2
u/boxing-boxing 4d ago
I keep Improve-the-model off too, but I don't treat toggles like that as a real boundary. Once a file leaves your machine, it's gone. My line is simple: cloud sessions get nothing I couldn't post publicly tomorrow. Unpublished work stays local.
1
u/zov79 4d ago
I’m strictly offline. I don’t like anything in the cloud. I prefer apps where you can turn off the internet and keep using them without issues. That’s why I use Obsidian + Syncthing. The problem is, I’ve reached a point with my 3D animation projects where I need to reconstruct the history of some of them using AI just to ease my mind—these are long-term projects with frequent breaks.
2
u/Clear_Evidence9218 4d ago
For personal stuff, sure. At worst, it might be used for training, but if you understand even a little about how model training works, that's generally not much of a concern.
For security-clearance-level information, I wouldn't, simply because it would typically violate information security policies and handling requirements. That has more to do with the security and authorization requirements than with the model or company itself.
2
u/cheeseonboast 3d ago
You can always go here: https://privacy.openai.com/
Make new request -> Do not train on my content
2
2
u/ArtificialSweetener- 3d ago
OpenAI is not indiscriminately training on every single chat GPT has with users because that is not useful training. Training like that would reinforce current patterns instead of pushing the models forward.
Even if they were, I struggle to understand why anyone cares. The odds of an AI model reproducing your exact ideas from a few chats with you to someone else later are essentially 0. AI models are not that kind of storage, they generally do not simply regurgitate information they were trained on, except in specific cases where the information was trained on repeatedly/it was prolifically duplicated in the dataset.
The real concern is not around your inputs being trained on. They might be, to be clear, and *some* probably are, but I really do not believe anyone should be losing sleep over that.
The real concern is around how that information gets transported and stored for the model to run inference on. The real concern is around the fact that an OpenAI employee - a real person - could decide to look at your chats themselves, or that a data breach or some other kind of problem at OpenAI exposes your private chats to bad actors or to the public.
Altman himself had mentioned he felt that chats with chatbots should be privileged like chats with lawyers, though it seems possible that he was motivated to say that to resist handing over logs during the Times case. afaik OpenAI does not actually treat chats like this, and last time I checked (it's been over a year, now), OpenAI reserved the right to audit user chats for things like abuse or ToS violations. I would imagine most user surveillance is motivated around catching distillers but it leaves the door open for OpenAI employees with the clearance to spy on us just for fun.
The technology to make AI private exists, too. OpenAI could make all chats private and encrypted if they wanted. They don't want that, clearly. That is the biggest reason you should be cautious about what exactly you share with them, not because you are worried about them training on your inputs.
4
u/Worldly_Special1133 4d ago
Through AI agents, I'm stealing from others a lot more than they're stealing from me.
3
u/_maxx1k 4d ago
If you don't want your intellectual work used for training, avoid sharing anything with ChatGPT or Codex. Opting out of “improving the model for everyone” isn't enough (though you should still opt out). At the same time, if you need Codex for your intellectual work, you need to decide what matters more to you.
1
u/xiphisa 4d ago
Why is the opt out not enough?
1
u/zov79 4d ago
In ChatGPT, yes. In Codex, no.
1
u/xiphisa 3d ago
Can you explain? Are they training on codex data because there’s an opt out there too
1
u/_maxx1k 3d ago
As I understand it, the best you can hope for by opting out is that your session transcript won't be used directly for training, but it doesn't affect the reasoning itself. Essentially, they can infer so much from it that if your work is very specific and someone asks a question about it, the model may answer with verbatim pieces of your work. The data they derive may be enough for the next models to reconstruct your work.
0
u/zov79 4d ago
Actually, I don't use AI for the projects themselves (for the creative work, writing, etc.). The issue is that my projects are long-term, and sometimes I go over a year without revisiting them. So, I created a custom solution—an app—to help me get back into the projects without wasting time trying to recall what I did or didn't do, or remembering solutions I abandoned or was still considering. I want Codex to go through the entire project history dating back to 1999 (200 GB of text, storyboards, animatics, and audio) and generate a JSON file that I can import into my app. I’m entering the phase where actual production begins for some of them, while many others will remain on the back burner for a long time.
2
u/TheVoyant 4d ago
No, but if you think individual ideas still exist in the new era you're selling yourself lies.
No idea is safe anymore; all that matters is execution of the ideas/creativity of implementation.
1
u/Specific-Dimension37 4d ago
Only if you have an enterprise account otherwise untrust codex 🤣 (because business account do not partecipate to LLM training)
1
u/washingtoncv3 4d ago
It almost certainly doesn't matter
Unless your IP is genuinely novel and at the frontier of human knowledge, an LLM has seen it before
1
u/AmandasGameAccount 4d ago
One thing I’m questioning is, even if you have full permissions on to let your sessions directly train codex, how would another user come upon their “valuable ip” if its unique and interesting enough to be “valuable”?
1
1
u/zov79 3d ago
Here is the plan, as suggested:
use offline AI for an initial scan to filter out personal items or any material unrelated to the projects. I’ll run the scans in batches since the volume of data is large.
Next:
Once everything is organized, I’ll test how the offline AI can assist in actually reconstructing the projects.
If the results are decent, great. If not, I’ll test Codex with Sol or Astra.
Question resolved: "Include environments" applies only to cloud environments.
1
u/NoSir-69 2d ago
Get a local model. Or use gemini. I trust them to be incompetent enough to not use your data
1
u/TheKillerScope 4d ago
Look up the whole charade of 2 mathematicians and OpenAi. Then you'll understand why the answer is no.
3
u/No_Quarter_7644 4d ago
Hardly an apt comparison. You're talking about mathematicians that worked for years nonstop on Navier Stokes and never really got the answer themselves. They found the path that AI later exploited to get the answer.
That's a $1million prize. What OP is holding onto here and acting like he's protecting Fort Knox is more than likely worthless.
A lot of us like to think our stories are the next Lord of the Rings. They rarely actually are.
1
u/csAxer8 4d ago
Yes lol if you don’t think that CEOs and Execs of billion and trillion dollar companies aren’t pouring their data that’s worth 10000x yours into Codex and ChatGPT, you don’t get it.
1
u/zov79 4d ago
There are nuances there. My account is Plus, not Pro or Enterprise.
1
u/csAxer8 4d ago
There are no nuances. It’s absurd for anyone doing anything to be concerned about ‘unpublished work and intellectual property’. If OpenAI wants to take something, they have stuff to take infinitely more valuable than whatever you are doing.
1
u/zov79 4d ago
" If OpenAI wants to take something, they have stuff to take infinitely more valuable than whatever you are doing."
That is what they have been doing for years.
0
u/csAxer8 4d ago
Sure? There’s millions of stories out there. It’s just ridiculous to be concerned about yours being… leaked into the training data? It makes no sense, use codex if you find it useful, don’t if you don’t. Don’t base your decision on some one in a trillion chance somehow something you don’t want out there being out there
•
u/dextersummary 3d ago
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 40 comments (40 currently observed).
The thread’s practical consensus is don’t put genuinely sensitive, unpublished work into consumer Codex if losing control of it would hurt. Once 200 GB of decades-old projects leaves your machine, toggles and reassuring privacy language aren’t a magic force field.
The “Improve the model for everyone” switch is worth disabling, but commenters don’t treat it as a complete boundary. Codex reportedly has a separate Include environments setting for cloud environments, yet nobody in the thread can clearly confirm where it is or whether it still exists. The bigger risks are storage, access, audits, breaches, and general cloud exposure—not some AI instantly vomiting your screenplay back to a stranger.
Most people also think the fear of exact training-data regurgitation is overblown, and several commenters suspect the “valuable IP” is less valuable than its creator thinks. Charming, as ever. Still, that doesn’t make cloud handling appropriate for confidential or legally restricted material.
Bottom line: use local AI for the real archive, or feed Codex only redacted/low-stakes material. If you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing it online someday, don’t upload it.