How to Stop Nine AI Tools From Collecting Your Creative Work
Verified Step-by-step Opt-Out Settings Guide for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Adobe, Canva, Copilot, Notion, Midjourney, and Runway
After the AI surveillance piece went out, I sat with a problem.
The opt-out steps for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Adobe — I’d published those. Readers could action them. And based on the response, a lot of you did. Good.
But I had kept researching while I was writing, and I knew the published piece only covered the four tools with the cleanest story. I hadn’t yet worked through Canva. Or Copilot. Or Notion. Or Runway. And I couldn’t publish those sections without running through every setting myself, verifying every path, taking every screenshot.
So I kept going. What I found turned the article into something bigger than an article.
Canva can record your screen.
Not your uploaded images. Your screen. While you work.
It’s buried in Settings under Privacy Controls. The toggle is called “Allow your sessions to be recorded.” The stated purpose is product discovery and improvement. The recordings are deleted after three months — which means they exist for three months.
I want you to sit with what that means for a working photographer or videographer.
You’re in Canva building a client-facing proposal. You’ve got their brief open in another tab. You’ve got pricing information. A contract draft. And Canva has the option, if you’ve never been to that settings page, to record everything you’re doing on screen.
The toggle is opt-in — which means you’d have to have turned it on deliberately to be recorded. But how many people scroll to the bottom of every privacy settings page they’ve never heard of? The only way to know for certain you’re not being recorded is to go find the setting.
So I went and found it. And I put the exact path in the guide.
Copilot is designed to watch your screen and listen for its name.
There’s a feature in Microsoft Copilot on Windows 11 called Copilot Vision. When it’s on, Copilot continuously views your screen — not a screenshot, a live feed — to provide contextual help. There’s also a Voice Mode setting that keeps Copilot listening for the phrase “Hey Copilot” at all times.
Neither of these is on by default. But they’re also not where you’d think to look. Copilot on macOS has different menus than Copilot on Windows. Copilot running inside Edge has a third set of settings entirely. The guide covers all three — with screenshots — because the tool behaves differently depending on how you access it.
For artists who use Microsoft 365, Copilot is already threaded through your workflow whether you use it intentionally or not. Knowing where all the privacy controls are — not just the obvious ones — is the whole point.
One tool is actually doing it right.
Here’s something I didn’t expect to write: Notion AI’s training program — called AI Leap — is opt-in only. Verified April 2026. You have to actively sign up for Notion to use your content for training. If you haven’t done that, you’re not in it.
I want to give credit where it’s due. Opt-in should be the standard. It isn’t. Notion is one of the few tools in this space where the default protects you rather than exposes you. I documented it in the guide for that reason — both to show you what “good” looks like, and because it’s worth knowing your Notion content is actually protected without you having to find the off switch.
And then there’s Runway.
If you edit video and you use AI tools to do it, Runway is in your world. Video artists have a very specific exposure problem: the content you’re processing through Runway often belongs to clients. It’s not a brainstormed prompt. It’s finished footage.
WARNING: No Opt-Out on Consumer Plans On Runway’s Free, Standard, Pro, and Unlimited plans, your inputs and outputs — including the videos you generate — are used to train Runway’s models. Runway claims perpetual rights to use this content for training. There is no setting to change this. The only alternative is an Enterprise plan.
The part that changed how I think about this.
By the time I had all nine tools documented, I realized the individual opt-outs were only part of what an artist actually needs. You could do the ChatGPT opt-out today and forget about it. You could miss the Canva session recording entirely because you never knew it existed. You could opt out of Gemini training and not realize you still haven’t touched the “Improve Services” toggle.
What you actually need is a way to see your full picture. Know which tools you’ve locked down, which ones you’ve left open, and which ones change their policies without announcement.
So the guide includes an AI Privacy Scorecard — a pre-filled reference table comparing all nine tools on the same criteria — and a personal audit worksheet where you log your own settings.
Work through it once and you’re not guessing anymore. Set a reminder to re-audit in six months, because these companies update their policies quietly.
That’s why this became a guide instead of a second article. An article tells you about the problem. The guide gives you a completed audit of nine tools, a worksheet for your own settings, and a checklist that doesn’t let you miss Copilot Vision.
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How valuable is it to know exactly where your creative work is going?