Microsoft Pinky-Promises It's Not Training AI On Your Word And Excel Data

After a couple of recent social media posts, which claimed Microsoft was training AI on user’s Word and Excel data sent users into a frenzy, Microsoft has responded. According to the software giant, it was all just a big misunderstanding, much like an incident with Adobe earlier this year.

One of the first claims that Microsoft was scraping Word and Excel to train AI came from a Tumblr blog post. In the post, user meretu8 claimed Microsoft Office had “slyly turned on an ‘opt-out’ feature” which scrapes a user’s Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems, and that the setting was turned on by default.

A few days later, X user @nixcraft posted part of meretu8’s post, and wrote, “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 ...