Remove Copilot from Word

This is BS. I should not have to do this, and I fear it will compromise my account. Future updates will be necessary for functionality and will likely bring Copilot back (unless MS wakes up to the problem it is for many people). I do not pay Microsoft for an Office sub to have them 'help' me by gleaning my data, 'learning from me', and appearing (as an annoying icon) on each line of my intellectual property / my work.

There are also enormous legal ramifications for students and academic writers who have no desire to 'cheat' by allowing AI to write or organize their work.

And for those of us who are currently writing creative texts / fiction, that line by line icon is unbelievably annoying as I certainly do not want Microsoft contributing to or sampling / mining my work in any way at all. Microsoft must remove Copilot from user accounts which did not opt in.

You work for Microsoft as do some others in these chats about Copilot, and not even you know how to remove it?! This is very very very bad service by Microsoft.

On my Macbook I went: Word->Privacy->Manage Connected Experiences, and disabled all (apparently losing other functionality in the process), but after a restart, Copilot's margin icon is still there on my pages!

This is incredibly annoying. Users should not have to spend days of precious time trying to figure how to get out of something we did not opt-into. I'm paying $$$ per year for a functional Word programme, and I need Copilot gone asap.

Hello,

Welcome to the Microsoft Community.

Microsoft has recently been experimenting with new Microsoft 365 subscriptions (including the AI tool Copilot) to meet the needs of different users. As a result users in some areas may notice some changes to Microsoft 365 with Copilot being added to Microsoft 365. I fully understand the inconvenience this may cause, especially for some users who do not expect to use this AI feature.

If you prefer to use Microsoft 365 apps without Copilot at all. Please refer to the following to try to switch back to your old subscription.

• Visitaccount.microsoft.com/services.
• Select the Microsoft 365 Personal subscription you have and select “Manage”.
• Select “Unsubscribe”.
• View “Switch to a subscription that suits you better” and select “Microsoft 365 Personal /Family Classic”.
• After following the instructions to complete your subscription. Your subscription will automatically renew to Classic when its existing subscription expires.

However, the above method is for switching your subscription to Classic and you will not be renewing your subscription to Microsoft 365 Personal with Copilot, but since the update to the Microsoft 365 app has already been completed, you may not see the changes to the features and interface in 365 right away.

We recommend that you restore your Microsoft 365 version to a earlier version, see the following:

Restore your version of Office

• Close all Office software, in the "Start Menu", find "Command Prompt" (or "cmd"), right-click and select "Run as administrator" ;
• At the command prompt, type the following command and press Enter: cd %programfiles% \Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun
• Then enter the following and press Enter Officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.17531.20120 This will bring Office back to a stable version in February 2024.

If the above steps are successful, you'll be able to view Office version 17531.20120 under File -> Account -> Product Information. If another version is displayed here, it means that some of the steps were not executed successfully, please refer to the previous method and try again. After restoring, open any Office application, such as Word, click File -> account. On the right side, check the "Microsoft 365 and Office Updates" heading , click the "Update Options" button, and select the "Disable Updates" option to disable the auto-update feature. Please consider turning on automatic updates again after successfully switching to Classic to avoid updating again to a new version with Copilot.

I hope this is useful and please feel free to ask any questions.

Best regards,

Ian - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

There are other aspects of the updated Word features that i want kept for accessibility but i want to turn off copilot. Is this able to be done?

Consider university students that are forbidden to work with AI when writing their thesis! Any use of that, by inadvertently clicking that always shifting icon violates their terms!

We can choose to buy an electric car, but not own it, per se – only lease/subscribe options as the manufacturers still require access to 'update' the code for our driving pleasures. All the capability is there but the manufacturer have the control to turn on/off the go-fast toggle if you pay big dollars.

Thus, we subscribe to – but cannot dictate how – Microsoft controls our life or lets us drive our own workflow. And we are paying for this. We are paying Microsoft to access our IP, learn from us, and not give us the ability to turn functions off that we don't want or have adverse risks to our lives.

Why is there not a greater backlash globally against this?