There are a lot of reports floating around on Social Media about Microsoft using customer data from Word and Excel to train its AI models. Microsoft say this isn’t true, and I suppose I believe them.

For the moment at least.

The trouble is, I worry that any data held by Microsoft will be too easy a target in a future.

Microsoft says that they consider data in the public domain fair game for scraping. I don’t think I agree with them – I wrote my blog posts to be read by humans and discussed, not to be blended into bland smoothies that are squirted in disposable cups at the push of a button. And I don’t remember being asked if they could take my data for their LLMs, either. I don’t see why I should make it any easier for Microsoft to steal my intellectual property, either now or in the future.

I’ve only recently started using Microsoft Word, and that was because it was convenient for the day job.

I’ve learned my lesson. I used LibreOffice Writer happily for years, I’ve gone back to it. It’s not as polished as Word, but it’s more than good enough. I don’t care about the fact that it’s free: I believe it’s worth paying for quality software, and I always donate to open source projects that I use.

What I care about is that when it’s on the computer, running on Ubuntu, it’s mine. At least for the moment.

I feel like I’m pulling up the drawbridge. Those tech companies are circling…