Keep your prompts safe and private. It's not THAT hard! (pt.1)

(Part I) The problem

Ah, here we go. With the advance of the AI craze, the prompts are becoming the "new golden nuggets". While I have a special opinion on prompt engineering (another article topic maybe), I also understand that a good prompt can save you tons of effort in a particular area, and there are some "dark places" in the LLMs, where some research and automation or creative prompts can really make a difference. And these are valuable pieces of information that, believe me or not, everyone wants. Look at the next LinkedIn post that went viral: "50 prompts to make you a professional marketer bla-bla". People love prompt collections!

But not only people are after this new "gold".

For OpenAI and other LLMs providers, this information is also beneficial as it provides direct insights on topics of interest, model use cases, retraining opportunities, etc. For them, it's straightforward to collect these, as they have fine-touched their policies and tools to provide relative freedom to limit the collection of prompts and, at the same time to make it in such an elegant way that you still give them tons of prompt information.

Another type of company spawns like mushrooms after a good prompt rain, and they "give you the option to save your prompts for easier use". Yes, I know - there is a big struggle, especially if you decide to use ChatGPT interface and keep them private, or if you're using directly OpenAI API and Playground, and you must keep your experiments, progress and final results for reuse. Not to mention MidJourney.

So these new "useful" companies are giving you a nice interface, an easy place to keep all prompts and copy-paste. Sounds like a sweet deal, right?

Only If you're interested in jumping on that train - here are a few examples: https://promptitude.io/, https://goprompt.io/, https://promptwave.ai/, https://promptfolder.com/ , and there are even Google Chrome apps: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/promptbox-chatgpt-mid-jou/jekdojekbpnbboecmcokodmpgkkeogaj - just to mention a few, there are many similar out there, though I will not dig deeper.

I, personally would never be jumping on any of those trains :)

IMHO, there is something fishy about these companies, and the devil is in the details. I see a trend for similar types of companies - they have good TOS and Privacy Policies, and just there at some point, you can read that by using the particular platform you grant it with copyrights to your prompts. Any red flags yet? :)

This opens the possibilities for a plethora of problems - shared private information, shared corporate information, copyrighted pieces of materials, and sensitive information to start with - not by any other reason but simply because we, the wonderful people, are lazy and silly in many occasions while shining in others. And while we focus on our tasks and are grateful that some good folks are out there providing us with tools to organize our priceless corporate and personal prompts, I can't escape the feeling that they are harvesting prompts with re-use copyrights. And you can make quite a lot of things with a vast data consisting of prompts, believe me.

So, briefly, this is the problem.

You give your prompts away, for free to someone who, even in some cases, doesn't have a company registered or any credible data on their site. How it will be processed? Nobody knows, nobody is telling you! And sorry, but I'm not a fan of this type of 'deals', buried deep in the TOS.

I was thinking of this, and it turned out it's not that hard to have a good solution, that will take you to the next level with high privacy of the information, security, and synchronization across your devices.

In Part II of the article, you'll find the guide to an optimized prompt safeguarding process, that uses one small, wonderfully simple, privacy-wise, easy-to-use, and open-source (yeah, you heard this right) tool, that at the same time is quite extensible with cloud backup, synchronization and plugins, keeping your valuable prompts away from those 'good prompt samaritans' and the hungry LLM corporations.

Cheers, Marto