"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”"
medium.com/illumination/ms-wor…
#Microsoft #AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #MSWord #Privacy #Word
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Григорий Клюшников
in reply to Miguel Afonso Caetano • • •Tanquist
in reply to Miguel Afonso Caetano • • •Valentijn Sessink
in reply to Miguel Afonso Caetano • • •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".
microsoft.com/en/servicesagree…
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.
Microsoft Services Agreement
www.microsoft.comGeorgiana Brummell
in reply to Valentijn Sessink • •Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated)
in reply to Valentijn Sessink • • •@valentyn 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.
FediThing
in reply to Miguel Afonso Caetano • • •Sheri Gulam
in reply to FediThing • • •@FediThing Hey @libreoffice also while we're at it, I submitted a bunch of serious bugreports and I think I'm ready to pay someone for fixing them (unless it costs thousands of dollars), because I want to escape Microsoft products so bad but LibreOffice writer just has a bunch of bugs that make it impossible to produce large documents consistently.
Maybe some people will find this reply and respond. Thanks.
#libreoffice #writer #bug #bounty
LibreOffice
in reply to Sheri Gulam • • •LibreOffice Certified Developers — The Document Foundation
www.documentfoundation.orgГригорий Клюшников
Unknown parent • • •William B Peckham
in reply to Miguel Afonso Caetano • • •