Safety

Spark is an AI tutor for tech and AI fundamentals. It answers questions about how large language models work, how to write a good prompt, how the internet and HTTPS work, cybersecurity basics, and beginner coding.

Spark is not a friend, a therapist, or a companion. It is a computer program. It does not remember a learner between questions, it does not claim a relationship, and it is designed to be useful and then get out of the way. Before a learner’s first question, the app tells them plainly that Spark is an AI and not a person, and it repeats that during any unusually long sitting.

Spark can be confidently wrong. Every answer carries that notice, and we would rather a learner check something than trust it.

If a message reads as self-harm, suicidal thinking, abuse, or acute distress, Spark does not answer it as a tutoring question and does not steer the conversation back to tech. The app immediately shows supportive text and real crisis resources:

• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call or text 988. Free, confidential, 24/7.
• Crisis Text Line. Text HOME to 741741. Free, confidential, 24/7.
• Chat at 988lifeline.org

Three things about how this is built. The phone numbers live in our code and are never written by the AI, so a wrong digit cannot reach a person who needs the right one. The check runs before any AI call, so it cannot be blocked by a usage limit or by the tutor being unavailable. And the response carries nothing but support and the resource: no disclaimer, no upsell, no advertisement for us.

This is a signpost, not a crisis service, and it will not catch everything. If you are worried about someone right now, contact 988 or your local emergency services directly rather than relying on an app to notice.

Every answer Spark gives carries a Report this answer control, right underneath the answer itself. Tapping it asks what went wrong (harmful or unsafe, inappropriate for my age, wrong information, off topic, or something else), lets the learner add anything they want to say, and sends it to us.

Reports are never blocked by a usage limit. Someone who has used every question in their plan can still report the answer that used the last one. A person reads every report, and answers that should not have been given change what the tutor is allowed to say.

You can also email ellmentcreative@gmail.com at any time.

In the app, open Profile, find the AI section, and switch off AI answers. This is a real switch, not a hidden preference: with it off, the app makes no AI calls at all, so nothing a learner types is sent to our AI provider.

Lessons are unaffected, and so are the roughly eight in ten lesson steps that carry a hint we wrote ourselves. Those involve no AI and send nothing anywhere, so we leave them working rather than removing teaching in exchange for a privacy improvement you do not actually get.

When a learner asks Spark a question or requests an AI hint, that message is sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to generate the reply. We log the number of requests and the token totals for rate limiting and cost control. We do not store the message text.

The one exception is a report. When a learner chooses to report an answer, we store the answer, and the question that produced it if they leave that box ticked, because there is no way to review a report without the thing being reported. If a reported message reads as a crisis disclosure, we drop it and keep only the answer: a report must never turn into a permanent record of a young person’s worst moment.

The full detail is in our Privacy Policy, and the list of companies that process data on our behalf is at Subprocessors.

AILE is intended for ages 13 and up. The app asks for confirmation on first launch and does not knowingly collect data from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, email ellmentcreative@gmail.com and we will delete it.

We treat every learner as though they may be a minor. The AI disclosure and the take-a-break reminder are shown to everyone rather than only to users we have confirmed are young, because the cost of getting that wrong in the other direction is a teenager treated as an adult.

If something about the tutor worries you, we would rather hear it than not. Email ellmentcreative@gmail.com. Ellment Creative LLC, 9251 West 22nd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55426.