Microsoft has updated its Services Agreement to prevent the misuse of its AI services. The updated agreement includes a new section called “AI Services” that defines restrictions, use of content, and requirements associated with the use of the AI services.
One of the key changes in the updated agreement is that users are prohibited from attempting to jailbreak or reverse engineer AI Services. This is to prevent users from gaining unauthorized access to the AI services or from modifying the AI services in a way that could harm Microsoft or its users.
The updated agreement also prohibits users from using the data from Microsoft's AI services to train another AI service. This is to prevent users from using Microsoft's AI services to create a competing AI service.
Finally, the updated agreement requires users to obtain Microsoft's consent before using the AI services to generate content that is commercial in nature. This is to ensure that Microsoft is not associated with any content that is created using its AI services without its consent.
Putting a Wall Around AI Development
The updated Services Agreement will take effect on September 30, 2023. Users who continue to use Microsoft's AI services after September 30, 2023 will be agreeing to the updated agreement.
Microsoft provides the following key takeaways from the updated Services Agreement:
- “Reverse Engineering: Users may not use the AI services to discover any underlying components of the models, algorithms, and systems. For example, users may not try to determine and remove the weights of models.
- Extracting Data: Unless explicitly permitted, users may not use web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction methods to extract data from the AI services.
- Limits on use of data from the AI Services: Users may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.
- Use of Your Content: As part of providing the AI services, Microsoft will process and store user inputs to the service as well as output from the service, for purposes of monitoring for and preventing abusive or harmful uses or outputs of the service.
- Third party claims: Users are solely responsible for responding to any third-party claims regarding their use of the AI services in compliance with applicable laws (including, but not limited to, copyright infringement or other claims relating to content output during their use of the AI services).”
Microsoft Banking on Closed Approach
While many Big Tech companies are talking up open AI solutions – such as OpenAI with GPT-4 and Meta with LLaMA 2, Microsoft seems to be saying “hands off”. Let's be clear, there have recent doubts about just how open Meta and OpenAI are really being, but Microsoft is clearly taking a stricter approach to AI development.
Since the start of 2023, Microsoft has been going big on AI behind CEO Satya Nadella's vision to embed AI into all the company products. Since then, the company has furthered its partnership with OpenAI and collaborated with the AI developer to use GPT-4 and introduce services such as Bing Chat, Bing Image Creator, Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Dynamics 365 Copilot, and more.
