How to turn off AI-scraping from your Word documents
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.How to Turn off Word’s AI Access To Your Content
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”
Gonna yell about it again...
If you do not absolutely need Word (for work or school or a functionality that exists literally nowhere else), just stop using it.
For a 1:1 Word replacement, I'd always recommend LibreOffice. There's also a version of OpenOffice still around, though it updates at a slower pace.
If you're a fiction writer and would like to switch to a dedicated novel writing software, the free options tend to be a bit limited. However, there is SmartEdit Writer, which looks a lit like a slimmed-down Scrivener (which is pretty much the writing app, but has a one-time cost).
Most people don't need Word. It's just what's familiar. And even there, LibreOffice is very similar in design. It will also generally read your Word docs out of the box. The switch really isn't hard, I promise.
By all means, yell as much as you want.
