I mean, yes. That’s what we’re all kind of conjecturing on at the moment.

I want to warn against conspiratorial thinking because I’m always trying to avoid falling into it myself. We won’t ever really probably have direct proof of a lot of this unless there are credibly authenticated insider leaks from Microsoft.

But we can analyze evidence. Things like seeing that the Terms of Service have been updated for so many apps and online platforms to automatically opt-in your work for AI training purposes. The fact that Microsoft is forcing online accounts. The fact that Microsoft is defaulting save locations to OneDrive (https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-word-forcing-you-to-save-new-files-to-the-cloud-heres-how-to-stop-it/) and that they are training AI on pictures you’ve saved there and you can only opt out 3 times a year??? (https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/onedrives-ai-face-scanning-feature-suggests-it-can-only-be-disabled-3-times-a-year-but-that-doesnt-seem-right)

Telemetry is already pretty opaque; it’s hard to tell what data they are wrapping up in it and if I understand what you’re saying correctly, yes. It’s very easy to keep that bottled until the next time the computer comes online so that even your “offline” activities are monitored. Look at Recall or even before that, Activity History was already giving me the heebie-jeebies (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billing/what-is-the-recent-activity-page-23cf5556-4dbe-70da-82c8-bb3a8d8f8016)

They already consumed the entire internet, probably some time ago it’s been theorized. In order to keep chasing those diminishing returns they are incentivized to chase every new data source because that scales into profit (no it doesn’t, that’s the bubble, but that’s a whole other conversation).

It’s pretty bleak. Use Linux, etc.

That’s no theory, that’s reality

You can strip AI out of this post and nothing changes. Granting various things access to your various systems/works has and will do things like this.

AI will literally steal your soul.

You don’t have a soul to steal. And even if you did, if it was comprised of the documents you have on your computer, it would be the saddest soul to ever have existed. I pity you if this is a thing you seriously worry about, since it must surely mean your life is meaningless, drab, and without warmth of any kind.

All except this line is happening.

AI will literally steal your soul

And that can’t happen because it can’t steal what doesn’t exist.

There’s always pen and paper.

I mean that is pretty much what AI bros want to do… and/or maybe already doing

From a researcher/developer perspective: the biggest bottleneck that affects current-gen AI is the lack of high quality training data; the more high-quality (a.k.a. human-generated and not complete shitposts) training data, the better. What people write on their computers would probably overwhelmingly be high quality. That means, without major technological advancements… if AI companies have access to the types of contents you just described, it is very much in their interests to use them

I don’t 100% agree with this view, but if you subscribe to Prof. Emily M. Bender’s thought of seeing AI models as plagiarism machines, maybe you can say that AI is “stealing your soul”

That is, fundamentally, what some of us figure the long term plan is with Microsoft Recall.

It came with various guarantees of privacy, the first time they tried it.

But they know no one reads changes to terms of service.

The sad part is that I fully expect that to be the default reality in a few years: a Microsoft model training on every keystroke and click on every copy of Windows 11/12.

Did you try asking AI?