How to disable AI Copilot in Microsoft Word

If you liked Clippy you’re going to love Copilot. The invasive AI system now comes pre-loaded on all Microsoft 365 products. It scrapes your work while charging you a 43% premium for the pleasure.

Commentary by Bruce Barcott, TCAI Editorial Lead

Have you recently had Microsoft’s AI Copilot foisted on you as part of a software update? Did the forced acceptance give you flashbacks to that horrible U2 album Apple embedded in every iPhone 6?

You’re not alone.

I recently discovered Copilot, Microsoft’s AI “assistant,” popping up like the Demon Son of Clippy in my Word documents after downloading the latest MS update.

My blood nearly boiled. Three of my books have already been pirated and used without my permission to train AI models. I know this because they’re batched in the copyright-infringing Books3 dataset, which you can search by title or author name.

• Was your data used to train ai? search here.

  These two search engines reveal whose books and artwork have been pirated.

microsoft is ingesting your work as you write

Not enough that tech corporations are stealing my books. With this latest innovation their AI systems are ingesting my next book even as I write it.

Here’s the kicker: They’re charging me 43% more for the opportunity to have my work stolen.

If you’re a paying Microsoft 365 customer, you should know that Copilot isn’t merely offering suggestions. In order to offer those suggestions Copilot monitors and ingests your every keystroke. Your words and sentences are fed into Microsoft’s AI system as further data to “learn from.”

Invite one of the world’s biggest tech corporations to monitor your every word: What could go wrong?

• Microsoft tried an 'virtual assistant' once before. it was a notorious disaster.

  Learn about the tragic life of Clippy, the helper nobody wanted.

how to disable copilot

Fortunately, there is a way to disable the Copilot embedded in Microsoft 365 apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

The official Microsoft instructions for disabling Copilot within Microsoft 365 are located here.

I use Word for Mac. This is what worked for me, and it should work for all Mac users:

• First, update to the latest version of Word. This is counterintuitive but it’s the only way to disable Copilot. Once you’ve done that, follow the instructions below.

• Open Word and select the Word menu. Select Preferences. In the ‘Authoring and Proofing Tools’ section, select Copilot. Clear the Enable Copilot checkbox. Close Word, then restart Word. Copilot should be disabled.

• WAIT! You’re not done.

• Go back into Word, select Word > Preferences > Personal Settings > Privacy.

• Clear the ‘Turn on experiences that analyze your content’ checkbox. Then select OK.

• Close and restart your Word application.

The instructions are slightly different for Windows devices.

For Windows devices:

• Update to the latest version of Word.

• Open Word. Go to File > Options > Copilot.

• Clear the ‘Enable Copilot’ checkbox. Select OK, then close and restart the app.

• Go back into Word, select Word > Preferences > Personal Settings > Privacy.

• Clear the ‘Turn on experiences that analyze your content’ checkbox. Then select OK.

• Close and restart your Word application.

Use similar moves to disable copilot in excel, powerpoint, etc

If you clear the ‘Turn on experiences that analyze your content’ checkbox in Word, that should disable Microsoft’s ability to scrape your content across all of its platform apps like Excel and PowerPoint.

You will still need to go into each individual app and turn off Copilot within that app to remove its presence completely.