More and more websites & tech companies are using your info to train their artificial intelligence. And not everyone wants that. So I am frequently asked: What I can do about it? Am I allowed to opt out of AI?
It depends on the company:
LinkedIn just opted everyone in to their AI program. Everything you post on LinkedIn will now be used to train their artifical intelligence programs. But they did provide each user with a way to switch it off. If you want to opt out of this, visit this link and turn “Data for Generative AI Improvement” off.
Adobe
Adobe also uses the content you store in their Creative Cloud and Document Cloud spaces to improve their generative AI models. They do not use files stored locally (on your computer). If you want to opt out of their use of your Creative Cloud data, sign in to your account at this Adobe site, and turn off “Content Analysis for product improvement.”
Can you opt out of Facebook‘s AI training? In the USA, no, not really. But there is a lot of misinformation circulating about this. Some social media posts (on Facebook, TikTok and more) claim that you can go to a particular Facebook page and submit a request…
But those requests amount to nothing, at least for North Americans. In other countries, where there are better consumer protection laws, Facebook may heed those requests. But in the USA, Meta is very clear that they will do whatever they want with our data, so long as it is legally permitted.
If you do not want your data to train Meta/Facebook’s AI, delete it from the site or don’t post it there in the first place.
Twitter / X
Twitter has recently made a change, so that you no longer get a choice about AI-entanglement. Their new Terms of Service now clearly state that your use of X grants them the license to feed your material into their AI-machine. This includes anything you’ve typed, but also includes photos and videos. I’m sorry.
Microsoft
There has been some disagreement and misinformation circulating, as to whether or not Microsoft trains their AI on our Wod documents and other Office-created files. When I couldn’t find any consensus, I went to Microsoft themselves. I questioned them persistently until I finally got a solid answer from them:
I am relieved to see that they are not crawling through my Word documents and Excel files.
But when it comes to Copilot, you should assume that if you use it, you are actively giving it information to learn from. And nowadays, Microsoft’s AI is baked into the BIng search engine. If you want to use Bing without seeing Copilot results, you may hide them. Perform a search on Bing and then click the hamburger menu to the upper-right. Look for “Copilot response on result page” and turn it off if you like. But I suspect Microsoft may still use your search requests to improve all of their services…
Other Sites
Every website may or may not give you a way to opt out of training their AI. If I discover other big-name websites that make it easy to opt out of, I will add the details to this post!