Microsoft Clamps Down on Windows

Microsoft's AI tools were helping users bypass it's own licensing system. Which brings up questions about AI censorship.

In an interesting and somewhat amusing turn of events, users who were attempting to pirate versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system were being assisted by the company's own tools.

Copilot, Microsoft’s AI app, was obviously trained very well on the Windows operating system. When users asked certain questions, it would offer suggestions like using unauthorized product keys or tweaking system settings to activate Windows without a valid license. Users also reported having it generate scripts to produce key generators or automation scripts to help them continue without activating Windows.

Of course, much of this information is available on the internet if one were to search and read enough. However, AI's ability to quickly scrape information from the net and summarize for the user makes this process significantly easier.

This raises the question of whether Microsoft should even be charging licensing fees for Windows, but that’s a subject for another article.

Copilot now rejects any queries about workarounds, explaining that using Windows without licensing is illegal. Effectively, Microsoft has censored its AI by restricting certain responses. This isn’t the first time this has come up, and it raises some important questions about censorship in AI.

If you were to ask Google’s AI Gemini about something political, you might get an answer like the one below:

There were issues with AI providing information for certain political topics and not others, as well as issues related to race, gender, etc., leading to accusations that AI developers were pushing specific agendas and censoring others. Elon Musk has also been critical of this and developed xAI, which he claims combats this and provides uncensored information.

There are very important considerations to be made. Should AI be able to teach someone to make a bomb? Plan a robbery? But on the flip side, what if a writer wants to use AI to brainstorm plausible ideas for a robbery in their story?

More and more of these questions are coming up as AI technology evolves, and there isn’t a clear-cut answer.