Microsoft Office AI training report is based on a misunderstanding, says the company

A tweet claiming that Microsoft Office uses the content of customer documents to train its AI systems raised a lot of eyebrows, but the tech giant says that it’s a simple misunderstanding.

A Linux account with hundreds of thousands of followers tweeted the claim …

NixCraft tweeted:

Heads up: 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.

The tweet included a screengrab of instructions which referenced it as a “new AI privacy agreement.”

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”

However, the official Microsoft 365 account responded, stating that the claim is false.

In the M365 apps, we do not use customer data to train LLMs. This setting only enables features requiring internet access like co-authoring a document.

9to5Mac’s Take

Given some of the unethical behavior we’ve seen when it comes to training AI models, it’s not surprising that these claims arise, and get attention when they do. In this case, Microsoft’s unequivocal statement makes it clear it’s based on a misunderstanding.

Tech giants do in part bring this on themselves, however, through extremely lengthy and opaque privacy policies which can make it hard to understand what they are and aren’t doing.

Adobe ran into a similar problem earlier this year, not helped by an initially dismissive comment which failed to properly clarify the position. It was subsequently forced to make a much clearer statement.

Tech companies would be doing a service to themselves as well as their users if they revamped their privacy policies to be as succinct and transparent as possible.

Photo by Ed Hardie on Unsplash