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With a whole bunch of folks leaving MS Word and similar as of late, seems like the right time to post this again, but I put together a little resource to help explain *why* it's so important to ditch Word and similar.

nopilot.xyz/

[edit: I'm aware of some readability issues on some systems, and am working to fix. See note below.]

This entry was edited (6 days ago)

Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.

in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

I even have my e-mail signature set to remind people to be careful before opening things in Word; after all, it can be really easy to accidentally betray trust by opening a draft.

(If "consider before printing this e-mail" is a thing, avoiding carbon-chugging LLMs has to be at *least* as important.)

in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

the article makes a very good point about MS Office using any documents, including those from other people, to train their LLMs. I mean if you accept MS terms, fine. But people who send you documents (which may have been created with Libreoffice) have not agreed to any of those terms. Makes me wonder if the terms of service are even legal...
in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

Constructive:

I think the article is perhaps a bit verbose and long-winded to win over a lot of laypeople / disinterested office workers. Adding a "tl;dr: opening documents in Word/GDocs automatically uploads the contents for AI training without the author's consent. Consider alternatives like LibreOffice" might help.

Also, you used the term "LLM" before you use the term "large language model", and the target audience probably doesn't already know what LLM stands for. Same with GAN.

in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

Thanks to everyone who's pointed out that the page is very difficult to read on some systems; I have not had that happen on any of the laptops and/or phones that I have access to, so I wasn't able to notice that earlier, and I apologize for the accessibility issues that creates.

I'm not, unfortunately, a professional webdev, and have found it a little challenging to make a plain HTML page that works everywhere.

Someone in DMs very kindly suggested a fix, and I'll look at applying that ASAP.

in reply to Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

I *think* it should be fixed? On my laptop and phone, it looks identical to how it used to, but it now doesn't fix the zoom level in CSS, such that hopefully it should work well in more browsers and on more devices.

Thanks again to everyone who let me know about the problem, and for the kind person who suggested a fix in DMs.

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