"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”"
"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.
@remixtures@tldr.nettime.org There are dozens of alternative options for writers, and a healthy amount for Excel. There really is no need to be using MS product in the year of our lord 2024. Imagine actually paying to then spend your life dealing with their massive amounts of bullshit. Ludicrous.
@remixtures 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 a fucking moron and you should leave this feature on so you'll keep poisoning Microsoft's data with your inane bullshit.
@remixtures FWIW, in contrast, I was formerly a professional business writer who had most content used without permit or license by offshore thieves decades ago. It no longer bothers me and I have no expectation of privacy or protection now. People who seek privacy seem to me to be fighting a losing battle. I use Microsoft 365 including Copilot daily in my work and personal life now.
"DeFlock runs on Open Street Map, an open source, editable mapping software. He began posting signs for DeFlock to the posts holding up Huntsville’s ALPR cameras, and made a post about the project to the Huntsville subreddit, which got good attention from people who lived there. People have been plotting not just Flock ALPRs, but all sorts of ALPRs, all over the world.
“I’ve become good at spotting them just because I’m kind of subconsciously always looking for them,” he said.
“I want everyone to be aware that this is happening. And I don’t think I can change people’s minds—some people will be fine with it. But some people won’t be,” he said. “And hopefully enough people won’t be fine with it and will do something to get them taken down [in their city] or at least better controlled, preferably taken down.”
When I first talked to Freeman, DeFlock had a few dozen cameras mapped in Huntsville and a handful mapped in Southern California and in the Seattle suburbs. A week later, as I write this, DeFlock has crowdsourced the locations of thousands of cameras in dozens of cities across the United States and the world."
"DeFlock runs on Open Street Map, an open source, editable mapping software. He began posting signs for DeFlock to the posts holding up Huntsville’s ALPR cameras, and made a post about the project to the Huntsville subreddit, which got good attention from people who lived there. People have been plotting not just Flock ALPRs, but all sorts of ALPRs, all over the world.
#USA#Taxes#TaxEvasion#TaxAvoidance#Inequality#Billionaires: "Billionaires are pretty confident that they can't be taxed – not just that they shouldn't be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They're not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles.
If it's impossible to tax billionaires, then anyone who demands that we tax billionaires is being childish. If taxing billionaires is impossible, then being mad that we're not taxing billionaires is like being mad at gravity.
Boy is this old trick getting old. It was already pretty thin when Margaret Thatcher rolled it out, insisting that "there is no alternative" to her program of letting the rich get richer and the poor go hungry. Dressing up a demand ("stop trying to think of alternatives") as a scientific truth ("there is no alternative") sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you're doing science.
Billionaires basically don't pay tax – that's a big part of how they got to be billionaires:"
#USA#Taxes#TaxEvasion#TaxAvoidance#Inequality#Billionaires: "Billionaires are pretty confident that they can't be taxed – not just that they shouldn't be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They're not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles.
#AI#GenerativeAI#Philippines#WageSlavery: "The mathematical models underpinning AI tools get smarter by analyzing large data sets, which need to be accurate, precise and legible to be useful. Low-quality data yields low-quality AI. So click by click, a largely unregulated army of humans is transforming the raw data into AI feedstock.
In the Philippines, one of the world’s biggest destinations for outsourced digital work, former employees say that at least 10,000 of these workers do this labor on a platform called Remotasks, which is owned by the $7 billion San Francisco start-up Scale AI.
Scale AI has paid workers at extremely low rates, routinely delayed or withheld payments and provided few channels for workers to seek recourse, according to interviews with workers, internal company messages and payment records, and financial statements. Rights groups and labor researchers say Scale AI is among a number of American AI companies that have not abided by basic labor standards for their workers abroad."
#AI#GenerativeAI#Philippines#WageSlavery: "The mathematical models underpinning AI tools get smarter by analyzing large data sets, which need to be accurate, precise and legible to be useful. Low-quality data yields low-quality AI. So click by click, a largely unregulated army of humans is transforming the raw data into AI feedstock.
Gregory's Server
@remixtures@tldr.nettime.org There are dozens of alternative options for writers, and a healthy amount for Excel. There really is no need to be using MS product in the year of our lord 2024. Imagine actually paying to then spend your life dealing with their massive amounts of bullshit. Ludicrous.
@remixtures 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 a fucking moron and you should leave this feature on so you'll keep poisoning Microsoft's data with your inane bullshit.
@remixtures FWIW, in contrast, I was formerly a professional business writer who had most content used without permit or license by offshore thieves decades ago. It no longer bothers me and I have no expectation of privacy or protection now. People who seek privacy seem to me to be fighting a losing battle. I use Microsoft 365 including Copilot daily in my work and personal life now.