Local, cloud and institutional deployments - which one are you actually using
Lesson 5 of 6 · What you cannot paste
1 · Learn the move · Comparison matrix
"Using AI" names at least five different data paths, and the paste decision is different on each. A consumer chat account, a pay-per-call API, an institutional tenancy your university negotiated, a model running entirely on your own hardware, and the AI feature quietly embedded in your ELN or instrument software - these differ in where the data goes, how long it is retained, whether it can be used for training, and who the agreement is actually with. Most researchers cannot say which path they are on, and the vendor's marketing page is not the document that decides it. The comparison matrix is the move: rows are the tools you actually touch in a week, columns are the questions that matter, and every cell you cannot fill from a document you have seen is UNKNOWN. The UNKNOWN cells are the homework, and they route to IT and procurement - not to optimism.
Build a deployment matrix for the AI touchpoints I list below. Columns: WHERE DOES PASTED DATA GO, RETENTION, USED FOR TRAINING?, WHO HOLDS THE AGREEMENT, APPROVED FOR WHAT DATA CLASS. Fill a cell only from a document I name or paste; otherwise the cell is UNKNOWN with the question that would fill it. End with the UNKNOWN list as questions for IT / procurement, ranked by how much sensitive material realistically flows through that tool. Tools: [list every tool, including embedded features]
2 · Your turn. You write the prompt
Your lab of nine people uses a consumer chat tool, two API keys of unclear ownership, whatever the university licensed last year, and an ELN that added an AI summarize button nobody asked about. The PI thinks these are all roughly the same thing. Write a prompt that builds the matrix that shows they are not.
Remember: the AI sees only your prompt, not this page. If the situation isn't in your prompt, it doesn't exist.
Optional. These shape the output when you run your prompt below, not your score.