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.
↫ Dr. Casey Lawrence
The author of this article, Dr. Casey Lawrence, mentions the opt-out checkbox is hard to find, and they aren’t kidding. On Windows, here’s the full snaking path you have to take through Word’s settings to get to the checkbox: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”. That is absolutely bananas. No normal person is ever going to find this checkbox.
Anyway, remember how the “AI” believers kept saying “hey, it’s on the internet so scraping your stuff and violating your copyright is totally legal you guys!”? Well, what about when you’re using Word, installed on your own PC, to write private documents, containing, say, sensitive health information? Or detailed plans about your company’s competitor to Azure or Microsoft Office? Or correspondence with lawyers about an antirust lawsuit against Microsoft? Or a report on Microsoft’s illegal activity you’re trying to report as a whistleblower? Is that stuff fair game for the gobbledygook generators too?
This “AI” nonsense has to stop. How is any of this even remotely legal?
It’s not just in Word, actually, but in all of Office (like, PowerPoint sends everything you type in so it’s “designer” can offer design suggestions for your slides based on their content). I just last week made a presentation about AI for a network of non-profit orgs and inserted a slide about disabling this. Oh, and this checkbox _will_ check itself back on. It’s done it more than once to me.
Microsoft has not been very forthcoming https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/does-microsoft-word-scan-my-documents-to-train/88ed5ccb-7890-40eb-b55f-d59e5d0b43af
IMHO people are upset over the wrong facet of this. AI is being treated as a scapegoat for the bigger issue of corporate entitlements over private data. Yes it’s wrong that they’re using private data without permission to train AI, but the reality is this problem has roots long before AI. This is merely the latest incarnation of a long trend of corporations screwing around with our privacy for their own commercial gain. Google/facebook/etc have notoriously been hoarding private data and spying on users to sell ads for example. So…I’d agree violating user privacy is harmful, but all of it is harmful to privacy not because of AI, but because it’s wrong for corporations to invade people’s privacy at all.. It’s not a problem with AI in and of itself. We should be protesting the unauthorized corporate collection of private data on the basis that it’s not their data, it just shouldn’t be relevant that they’re using the data for AI versus any other commercial reason.
>”This “AI” nonsense has to stop. How is any of this even remotely legal?”
LOL, you should welcome your new AI overlords. Just hope they give you the tasty insects to eat instead of the disgusting slimy ones.
This can NOT be legal. Word is being used by many organisations and some things written inside is strictly confidential.