Copilot misses the question, elaborates on topic I was speaking aloud instead.
Was using my SO's laptop, I had been talking (not searching, or otherwise typing) about some VPN solutions for my homelab, and had the curiosity to use the new big copilot button and ask what it can do. The beginning of this context was actually me asking if it can turn off my computer for me (it cannot) and I ask this.
Very unnerved, I hate to be so paranoid to think that it actually picked up on the context of me talking, but again: SO's laptop, so none of my technical search history to pull off of.
Is it possible that your chain of questions is very similar to other "paranoid" users who inevitably question copilot about privacy, so this is a learned response?
I'll pull the rest of the context when she's back in town, I doubt she's used it more so it should be saved still. She looked at me when this typed out and said "you're fucking with me right?". I am still just as shocked, I wish I was fucking around and I have no other explaination how it would remotely key onto saying this given the previous interactions.
My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for 'inquiry' + 'privacy'.
I want to believe that is the explaination, I really would've expected at least a hardcoded "features and capability" response, or for it to be more than a neutered chatGPT that im sure neither of us are going to use
MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they've just slapped a bunch of extra 'features' (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda's game engine.
Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.
The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.
Looks to me like not audio tracking but that u somehow inadvertently triggered microsofts privacy training they have given to copilot. Im guessing the ai was being too vocal about privacy and microsoft wanted to tame it and get it to downplay etc.
Asked for help with a coding issue, ChatGPT wrote a long, rambling and largely nonsensical answer that included the phrase “Let’s keep the line as if AI in the room”.
I have to credit to the novelty of the technology, there's certainly a reason I'm wanting to self host models, my concern really is with what data is being used, and how these models are being trusted.
My goal is to contribute the least useable data to the likes of OpenAI "in the puruit of AGI" because it will inevitably become as did MS Tay did, especially if something can change on their end and suddenly have it spitting out garbage for users who may be potentially at risk of bad advice or actually paranoid.
That also doesn't mean I havent and wont use chatGPT, it certainly has been a useful tool, knowing its limitations, but OpenAI has their head in the clouds and it only leads to greed in pursuit of an end goal. /Imho
I think AI is humanized and otherwise designed so that people will feel encouraged to give private data to it. The Kagi Corporation wrote about this in their manifesto. In reality, giving your data to open AI is just as unsafe as typing in a personal search query into Google or Bing. But by changing the context, it feels like you're talking to a friend or a person you met at a bus stop.
AI Bros always say "it's just a tool" as a sort of thought terminating cliche (note: this wasn't intended to be a dig at your comment). Guns are a tool too. I wouldn't want the richest corporations in the United States to personally own the most powerful missile systems, and in terms of AI, that's kind of where we are.
There’s a real risk of survivorship bias here. Somebody asking about a car gets that and thinks nothing of it. A privacy minded person, however, would find it odd. And being the kind of person concerned about what could have been the cause considered the prior conversation.
I’m not saying its an unreasonable concern or technically not feasible. It’s just not how the LLM’s tend to work.
Id consider it more likely to be a bug, or general inquiries like you said, or that SO had a bunch of documents locally that reference privacy or browsing history (anytime really) that MS could have used as a kind of “here’s more about the person asking you a question”
I will tomorrow, I understand where the skeptisism comes from, I still very much doubt that it is listening, I do have my Firefox account on her laptop, but regardless it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth
Edit: this is no more than about 6 messages into using it, first few were garbage my SO tried out, then I was curious of its actual utility, not really coming at it to find a problem
I believe it uses your browser history to gauge your interests and bases its responses partly on the type of stuff you participate in repeatedly.
So if for example you browse websites related to privacy more than anything else, it takes that into account and gets all creepy about it.
If its anything like Cortana's permission it'll have access to all your web searches. Cortana also had speech and typing personalization, so Microsoft is definitely giving copilot at least those permissions.
Copilot is weird and can give out very weird responses that have little to do with your conversations.
And of course it might just grab context depending on what you do (e.g. clicking the copilot button might already do that).
I found it works best as GPT model if you disable the fancy stuff like search. It too easily looses track of what happened or completly goes off the rails.
(i believe disabling search is a beta feature in some regions, but its a hidden flag you can theoretically set, i made a tampermonkey script to add a button).
I hate the slow UI of Copilot, so i translate requests from a different GPT interface.
This may not have been an instance of it spying on you; what can you do may be similar to other searches involving privacy, but one would do well to remember thst companies have been repeatedly caught spying on users.
I'm sharing to say that whether this is an instance of spying or weird coincidence, you should absolutely assume that companies will violate your privacy at every opportunity because that's what they've done.
This is exactly what I would hope to show up in conversation, to me it really doesnt matter if you think your privacy may be violated, there are more than enough examples of it actually being violated to warrant taking precautionary and reductive measures in our digital footprints
I doubt that it's sending audio data back to Microsoft although it probably does have access to your search history if you've used bing / the inbuilt search bar.
I will post the full context tomorrow when I can use the laptop again. No previous chats had anything to do with privacy and this was the first chat since the update. The first chat was something like "shit fart" that my SO had scientifically gauged the model with
It's a LLM. You asked it "what can you even do" and one of the most hot topics with AI is privacy concerns. With Copilot being neutered by MSFT to produce curated responses asking it what it can do, and it branching to privacy concerns first, seems totally reasonable