Microsoft is starting to integrate AI shortcuts, or what it calls AI actions, into the File Explorer in Windows 11. These shortcuts let you right-click on a file and quickly get to Windows AI features like blurring the background of a photo, erasing objects, or even summarizing content from Office files.
Four image actions are currently being tested in the latest Dev Channel builds of Windows 11, including Bing visual search to find similar images on the web, the blur background and erase objects features found in the Photos app, and the remove background option in Paint.
Just because the UI exists in file explorer doesn’t mean the data processing is happening locally. It’s likely happening on MS’s cloud. Maybe some actions happening locally on new machines with NPU chips
I want to believe you, but I’ve been burned before.
I’m not sure what you mean. I’m saying that this work is almost for sure being sent to Microsoft’s servers, which is certainly a bad thing. That is burning anyone who uses it
I thought you meant they wouldn’t be processing your files locally. You’re saying they’re taking all of your local files and sending them to the cloud though?
Likely in pretty much every case they are taking files that you perform an AI function on and uploading them to their cloud.
I said the few exceptions might be very low effort work that could run on the new NPU chips coming with some PCs. But I doubt they would even do that because it’s passing up the opportunity to use consumer data to train their models.
So yes, if you use an AI feature, MS is taking your file(s) and training it’s models on it