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Comment by rrrix1 | Hacker News Reader

My magic crystal ball just showed me that they're going to use your email for training AI models.

They're just trying to catch up with Google in any and every way they possibly can, users trust, privacy and security be damned.

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I don’t know about this. Microsoft would already have a huge body of e-mail to train on with Microsoft 365 and outlook.com if they wanted to I guess?

Yes, but mostly internal corporate emails, stretching back decades, with most of the content about how to violate user privacy using various sneaky schemes. I wonder what kind of A.I. would result from training on such content.

Microsoft have run hotmail/outlook.com for decades.This is a service used by hundreds of millions of people, I would guess mostly non corporate. I think they have more than enough personal email data to train on if they wanted to.

This. I would gather it’s one of the bigger free mail services after Gmail, at least in the western world.

I mean the mails of all their Microsoft 365 customers. Which at least where I live is the majority of all businesses.

Catch up? This is an attempt to re-claim, or solidify, monopoly.

Does the crystal ball say anything about what’s going to happen if Copilot or Bing start revealing non-public information to anyone who asks? It’s bound to happen if they train on non-public information. Imagine Microsoft accidentally releasing other companies’ corporate strategies and proprietary internal tech, or people’s personal finances and private social interactions. I would foresee both major litigation and government regulation coming down pretty hard. I would also expect a dramatic migration away from the product if something like that came to light. I honestly hope they’re smarter that this- training on data without explicit permission is already one of the biggest problems with AI efforts.

You use public data only for your external-facing products like Copilot and Bing.

You use all data, public and private, for your in-house skunkworks LLM-AI used by vetted, NDA-bound staff and execs.

Bing won't be able to answer questions like "What are the monthly active user counts for CoolService LLC?" or "What are the manufacturing processes used at Gadgetmaster International?" but maybe DarkBing will.

Even if LLMs aren't good enough to deliver those answers today, they might be in five or ten years, and in the meantime you want to fill the pool of data you're going to feed it.

Cynical speculation? Yes. Eventually possible? Maybe...

> They're just trying to catch up with Google in any and every way they possibly can

Except when it comes to AI, Google is the one playing catch-up to Microsoft/OpenAI.

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