Artificial intelligence has been dominating the news recently, first with the government’s announcement to use AI to boost growth and improve services and most recently, the arrival of DeepSeek, the Chinese produced model that has sent shock waves through the tech world.

DeepSeek has caused such a stir partly because of how cheap it was to create – the company claims it cost less than £5million in computing power to develop, whereas other models such as ChatGPT are around the £80million mark.

But despite all the noise and excitement around DeepSeek and the AI market in general, there are some fundamental issues that need to be considered when using any of these artificial intelligence tools – security and data management.

Lifeline IT’s Adam Woolf explains more.

“Everyone is excited about AI and rightly so, as it has the potential to significantly change how we do business and run our personal lives. But the security implications are vague and unknown. Products are being developed at pace with little or no regulation around data security.

“Where people need to be especially careful is when using free versions of AI applications – as the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. These companies may be offering you a resource to use at no cost, but they will be getting something in return and that includes access to you information and data.

“If you are using these free AI tools, be careful about what you input and, as a rule, only put in information that is already in the public domain. For example, if you put in a customer’s personally identifiable data, such as an address and email, this may then be available across the whole of the world wide web. With cyber criminals now being incredibly sophisticated in how they operate, having access to this kind of personal data can be very useful to them.”

Added Adam: “With any AI tool that you’re thinking of using, always do your research and understand how the data is being used.”