Anonymising selected text with AI

What this does

Anonymize Text (AI) passes the selected text to the language model and has it rewritten so that people and organisations are no longer identifiable. Names become role descriptions, places become general references, dates get vaguer – the sense of the text stays.

This is not the same as redaction: what you get is readable text in which details have been replaced, not removed.

Where to find it

Task menu ▸ Anonymize ▸ Anonymize Text (AI)

Select the text in the document first. Without a selection there is nothing to work on.

What you may expect – and what not

The model makes a judgement. It has no list of what counts as sensitive in your organisation, and it cannot know which detail makes somebody identifiable in your particular context.

Expect the following:

• A name appearing only once, in a footnote, gets missed.
• A detail stays that looks harmless on its own but is unambiguous in combination with the rest – a date plus a department plus a role.
• File references, customer numbers or contract numbers are not recognised as sensitive.

So check the result yourself before passing the text on. If you want to rely on specific, always-identical terms, Anonymize Text (terms) is the more dependable tool: it removes exactly what you named – no more, but no less either.

The markup question

Depending on your settings you first see: "As per your current settings no markup will be applied. For anonymizing a larger text, doing a markup may be a better choice. How do you want to continue?"

• Continue as is – the text is replaced directly.
• Continue with a markup – the changes appear as a traceable revision.

For anonymisation the second answer is nearly always the better one. You then see word by word what was replaced – which is exactly what you want to check here. Without markup you have to read the new text against your memory.

Afterwards

The result is in your document. The original is overwritten unless you worked with markup.

So save the anonymised state as a new file and leave the original untouched. Otherwise all you have left in the end is the anonymised version.

When nothing happens

• No text selected – select first.
• A very long selection – formatting can be partly lost on very long passages. Work section by section in that case.