Last September, deep in the bowels of Microsoft Office 365, a small addition was made. A simple tick box with an innocuous title: “Turn on optional connected experiences”. ‘Who wouldn’t want more “connected experiences”?’ Microsoft clearly reasoned, and ticked the box for everyone. In so doing, and almost certainly without your awareness, they gave themselves access to scrape everything you write and feed it into their voracious AI engine.
“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.”
Tom’s Hardware
Why is this important to writers? I’ve previously shown how a very basic AI—one that you can download and use on your home computer—can produce ‘original’ writing in style of authors like James Patterson, J. K. Rowling and Lee Child. And last year, Hollywood script writers discovered that more than 139,000 TV and film scripts had been used to train AI systems:
“…many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. Not just on The Godfather and Alf, but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies. … It includes writing from every film nominated for Best Picture from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad.”
Alex Reisner, The Atlantic
By way of response, Microsoft posted on X:
“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.”
Microsoft 365 on X
But it’s actually a little more than mere co-authoring. Microsoft’s own Connected experiences in Office page lists 35 ‘connected experiences that analyze your content’, 20 ‘connected experiences that download online content’, along 30 ‘other connected experiences’.
Get me out of here!
So how do you opt out? Pretty straightforward (not!). Here we go:
In Word or Excel:
- Click File (in the top left-hand corner).
- On the screen that opens, click on Options in the bottom left-hand corner.
- The Options dialog pops up. Click on Trust Center at the bottom of left side menu.
- Click the Trust Centre Settings button to open the Trust Center popup.
- Click Privacy Options on the left side menu.
- Click Privacy Settings to open yet another popup headed Your privacy matters. (Yeah, right!)
- Here you’ll find a panel titled Optional connected experiences with an already ticked tick box labelled Turn on optional connected experiences.
- Untick it and click OK. You’ll be told a restart of Office is required. Click OK.
- Click OK to close the remaining popups and close the application completely.
- Restart the application and the setting should be set.
Oh, that’s a coincidence!
Quite coincidentally, and also last September, LinkedIn—a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft—pulled a similar stunt by opting its one billion+ members into another AI data grab.
Fortunately, that one’s easier to manage. Click on your profile, choose Settings & Privacy, Data Privacy then Data for Generative AI Improvement.
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet
With the emergence of the Chinese AI DeepSeek, the competition for unique training data is only going to get more intense, so expect a lot more default opt-in’s and a lot more hidden tick boxes.
Or you could just ditch your old office suite and go for a FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) alternative like LibreOffice. There’s versions for Windows, Mac and Linux, it works with all MS Office file formats, and it’s free—both price wise and free from secret data gathering. I use nothing else and have done so for more than a decade.
Download it here.
