The IT Nerd

Microsoft is really doing some dumb things in regards to AI. The best example is Recall. But strangely Microsoft has managed to top that according to Tom’s Hardware:

It is not a secret that Microsoft‘s Office has Connected Experiences which analyze content created by users. However, according to @nixCraft, an author of Cyberciti.biz. Microsoft’s Connected Experiences feature automatically gathers data from Word and Excel files to train the company’s AI models. This feature is turned on by default, meaning user-generated content is included in AI training unless manually deactivated. However, this deactivation is a very convoluted process. Microsoft has yet to comment on the information, so take it with a grain of salt.

This default setting allows Microsoft to use documents such as articles, novels, or other works intended for copyright or commercial purposes without explicit consent. The implications are significant for creators and businesses relying on Microsoft Office for proprietary work, as their data could become part of the company’s AI development. For this reason, anyone concerned about protecting their intellectual property or sensitive information should take action immediately.

To do so, users must actively opt out by finding and disabling the feature in settings. The process requires unchecking the box ‘Turn on optional connected experiences’ that is enabled by default.

Well that’s pretty slimy. Microsoft is scraping your data for its AI ambitions, and you have to opt out of it if you don’t like it. On top of that, they didn’t tell you that this is what they were doing. So needless to say, I have disabled this on my computers that run Office. And you should too. A person on Bluesky found the settings to disable this for both Mac and Windows. Which is handy as the Tom’s Hardware article only as instructions for Windows:

Now if what I have written to this point hasn’t convinced you that this is bad, maybe this might:

Microsoft has not publicly confirmed or denied that it uses content from Excel and Word documents generated by users of Microsoft Office to train its AI models. Nonetheless, there is a clause in Microsoft’s Services Agreement that grants the company ‘a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content.’

“To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services,” the clause reads.

You know, I really hate it when companies try to alter their terms of service in order to justify this sort of behaviour. The fact is that companies who want to do this sort of thing need to clearly explain what they are doing and why. Then they need to have you opt in rather than force you to opt out. That way it stops people like me from calling them out. Speaking of which, now that this is out there in public, Microsoft needs to explain this in as much detail as required to make them trustworthy again.

This entry was posted on November 25, 2024 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.