It depends on the product's settings, not a fixed rule — and either way, your business stays accountable for any personal information you typed in.
Short answer
It depends on the product and its settings, not on some fixed rule. Some consumer chat products do use conversations to help train future models unless you opt out or use a business tier that doesn't; others don't by default. The Canadian point that doesn't change either way: your business remains accountable for any personal information you type into the tool, whatever the vendor's training setting is.
Whether a conversation is used to update a model's underlying weights is a separate question from whether the product remembers your chat history for your own continuity within the app — the second doesn't require the first. Canada's federal, provincial and territorial privacy commissioners frame this by role rather than by product: “Developers and Providers” are the organizations that build or train a system, and “Organizations using Generative AI” are the ones deploying it — and, as their joint guidance notes, “An organization might shift between or play multiple roles at once.” (OPC, Principles for generative AI)
PIPEDA doesn't stop applying because a vendor's training setting is flipped one way or the other. The statute puts the obligation on the organization that collected the information in the first place: “An organization is responsible for personal information in its possession or custody, including information that has been transferred to a third party for processing.” (PIPEDA, Schedule 1, clause 4.1.3) If your Ontario business collects any personal information from customers or website visitors, it's very likely already caught by PIPEDA for reasons that have nothing to do with AI — Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta have their own private-sector statutes that apply instead within those provinces.
Read the specific tool's own privacy or data-use terms for whether conversations feed training, rather than assuming a default one way or the other — the answer genuinely varies by product and by tier. See also the same accountability question when the input is a document rather than typed text and what happens when the tool's output, not just its input, creates a problem.
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