"Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.
If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.
I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:
On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”"
https://medium.com/illumination/ms-word-is-using-you-to-train-ai-86d6a4d87021
#Microsoft #AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #MSWord #Privacy #Word
@remixtures What, exactly, isn't clear to people about "to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content".
https://www.microsoft.com/en/servicesagreement/
It's there. It's always been there. And no, you can't "turn it off".
"If you are a writer"? NO ONE should be using software with such an awkward clause in its license.
Like a landlord that comes to snoop in your stuff "to improve our housing facilities". Come on.
@valentyn @remixtures I mean, what isn't clear about that is that people have been saying for years that "that's in every service's terms of service, it's boilerplate text" (which is approximately true) and "it doesn't mean anything" (which is *mostly* but not entirely true).
So this framing feels a lot like victim blaming to me. There *are* realistically no services that don't have this clause, and this exact same clause is used to deal with a legitimate legal issue (namely, vagueness about what constitutes a derived work in a network context), so arguing "well it's always been there and you should've noticed" really doesn't help anyone.
If you want to criticize something, that criticism is better aimed at the culture and legal environment that have allowed this boilerplate to persist for so long without scrutiny.
