Last week, the company that I work for rolled out Copilot for all Microsoft Office apps.<p>AI does not really help me for the kind of work that I do, so this really didn't seem like it would affect me much. Except one day I open Outlook and there's this giant-ass honking big "Summarize this thread" bar that they added to Outlook. It's a full inch in height and full width, which means that it takes away valuable space needed by the message list and message pane. All for a single button. I would have preferred they fill that space with ads for Candy Crush, because at least then it would be doing something arguably useful!<p>Further, the company's legal team drafted a list of 11 things you CANNOT use Copilot for. I won't paste them here, but basically it amounts to not being able to use Copilot on anything you wouldn't share with the press or a competitor. I can't actually think of a single employee in the whole company who can follow these rules AND use Copilot effectively for their job. IT says that Microsoft enabled this for everyone using O365 and that they can't turn it off for individual users.<p>So basically I now have this fire-alarm sized button in the middle of the screen on my mail client that I must NEVER click.
If you shipped most software from 2024 back to 2000 it would be (correctly) labelled spyware. It also wouldn't run at all because system requirements even for simple applications have bloated beyond belief.<p>AI is just the latest iteration of these trends - now the vendor gets to record everything you put into their software and a text editor requires exotic new hardware so that the AI "copilot" can run and help you type every character.
This is an important concept that I’ve never seen described before.<p>It’s not just big tech. The government is also heavily depending on this creeping change in expectations.<p>Setting aside what it has been interpreted to mean legally, “<i>unreasonable</i> search and seizure” in English can either be taken to mean “searching without a reason” or “searching more than is normally expected.” Obviously the latter is how most people would read it.<p>In this way, huge legal invasions of privacy such as the Patriot Act and its descendants can never be viewed by the general public as unreasonable search, precisely because of how many people they affect. Everybody faces it, so it is incredibly commonplace, so everybody expects it, so it can’t be unreasonable.
You should never use an LLM/AI Chatbot with a third party service for anything that could be confidential, private in nature, or may have to do with your security.<p>All of the LLM/AI providers can read your contents. The only thing between them and your chats is "trust," and we've all had promises broken on us before.<p>Trust is not security.<p>Shameless plug: You can definitely use IPv6.rs and Cloud Seeder [1][2] to run Ollama and OpenWebUI on your own computer (confidentially) and access it via TLS remotely (via phone, etc.).<p>[1] <a href="https://ipv6.rs/cloudseeder" rel="nofollow">https://ipv6.rs/cloudseeder</a>
<a href="https://github.com/ipv6rslimited/cloudseeder">https://github.com/ipv6rslimited/cloudseeder</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_JyDvBbZ6Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_JyDvBbZ6Q</a>
>The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.<p>openai and azure routinely ban people for other reasons too. it's clear as day that all your prompts are logged, evaluated and stored indefinitely to be shared with a number of third parties, three letter ones and otherwise.
I kind of knew this already, I think many of us did, the idea that for kids growing up today, invasive technology is just normal for them. It's great to see the idea being formalized like this though.
The example I come back to a lot is xkcd on the changing climate: <<a href="https://xkcd.com/1321/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1321/</a>> ("...what used to be normal now feels too cold")