The software is labelled Beta, but is being pushed out to existing PCs anyway because… well… why not beta something in prod, it’s 2025 after all.
It appears in Game Bar, which is accessible from Windows Key + G. You may not have it yet as they are staging deployment. I’m not in Windows Insiders, but I have it installed — so it looks like the roll out is becoming wide. Note that I had uninstalled Copilot from my PC… but Gaming Copilot silently installed anyway.
It is similar to Recall, except not all the processing is done locally — it relies on the cloud. It screenshots gameplay, and then extracts elements of the screen (such as symbols and text) to work out what the player is doing. The idea is it can help you game, e.g. you can ask questions about what you’re doing in the game at a given moment.
Every day I’m happier I switched to the penguin
Penguin is a nickname for Linux, just letting people know.
Excuse me, I find that offensive. We are publicly known as “friends of Tux”
Some of us prefer “light in the bootloader” as a euphemism
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Windows is just malware at this point. No matter how much spyware junk you turn off, there is always more to come in the next update.
Yeah, or simply stuff you uninstalled and they reinstalled it. I have uninstalled Teams several times now.
I’m happily typing this from a Linux machine but it pisses me off that the vast majority of people will be OK with this, won’t know about it, or won’t care.
Big Tech has learned how to perfectly boil the frog.
the vast majority of people will be OK with this
I don’t think the vast majority of Windows users are even aware of the Xbox Game Bar to begin with, let alone all the features there.
Your point was addressed in the thing they said immediately after the part you quoted
I intentionally installed the Xbox Game Bar a few years ago. After doing so, it associated my Xbox login with my Windows PC, and linked the 2, switching my Windows10 user to my Xbox login.
Hard pass.
My response was to switch to Linux.
I’m so happy I fully moved to Linux 15 years ago.
privacy zuckering
I have been balls deep in some copilot studio stuff over the past week. It is legitimately one of the worst applications I’ve use in my life. In a business environment, there is no security unless you pay for premium licenses for every user that touches a managed environment. That’s $30 per user per month for basic security. If you have one agent that 1000 employees may use, that’s baseline $30k per month. If you don’t have a managed environment, the anybody in your organization with a copilot license (not copilot studio) can login to the default environment, create agents, and share them indiscriminately. There is no middle ground.
Fuck everything about Microsoft. I really hope that AI kills them.
One of the most useless feature I’ve ever heard of.
One of the most useless feature I’ve ever heard of.
So far! Check the “news” again in 5min and be prepared for worse.
but Gaming Copilot silently installed anyway.
Well how else are they going to get training data?
I’ve just switched from Windows 10 to Windows 10 IoT LTSC (long term support channel), designed for IoT means there’s no AI garbage, game bar and any other crap installed, and I get updates until 2032.
Quite happy with it, after a disastrous experience with Windows 11 that essentially killed my system.
And no, I can’t switch to Linux due to company requirements. I work in finance and some of the banks we use operate by hardware tokens that only have Windows drivers.
To all the people in this thread hyping Linux. Please remember that those screenshots capture you as well if you play with windows users. If this becomes a staple and you refuse to be AI fodder, then multiplayer is pretty much dead to you.
And it’s worse when you remember your HR managers use windows.
I don’t think it’s AI related. If you play on a public server, you should expect your data to be public anyway.
If you play on a private server then there might be rules to be defined.
All that said, I’m not sure what information would actually be problematic to share but if that’s a problem, sure,
- play only of private servers than ban such AI tools (basically consider it cheating, which is arguably IMHO but I agree on the negative side effects)
- make a new account for multiplayer that has no public link with your identity
Could you expand a bit, I understand that their systems are compromised, but how does that provide information to them about you if you play a game together. Unless you are just referring to the information that a server host or your friend would know anyway.
Of course I am referring to info my teammates would know too. Are you inferring that it’s fine that big corporations are profiling you based on what you’re chatting with your friends about?
I’m not saying I’m OK with it, but I am saying that this data collection on game servers can be negated by not sharing information over in game chat. The rule I follow is that game chat is for talking about specifically the game or a discussing what platform we should communicate on instead; the unfortunate thing is that this ai would potentially compromise other services like your preferred messaging app. All in all, there doesn’t appear to be any reason to stop using cross play servers from a data privacy perspective.
automated screenshots when your username is visible, like player lists or above your character when in front of a compormised player
If that is what was meant, this is nothing new, server hosts have had this information and more for ages, and your gamertag is by no means priveledged information. I am having trouble trying to figure out how this change affects my willingness to play on cross play servers, as others have pointed out however I would be wary of compromised devices with privelidged data like banks or HR which I realistically have no way to protect myself from.
Having this info because of legitimate needs to provide a service and a third party processing it with AI without explicit consent for their benefit is a huge difference.
I fail to see how this ai isn’t a legitimate service, sure me and a lot of other people don’t want it, but there is an actual use case for it. It is very obvious to most of us here that it is a data collection scheme, but the data that a game server has on you should be unimportant, if it isn’t that is a failing on you for either playing such an invasive game or a failing on the game developer for making such information easily obtainable, either way this is not an issue for gamers who restrict the private information they share.
While I do want to someday have AI pals while gaming, I refuse to have Microsoft be one of them.
If someone somehow wants to test this locally I suggest
- install locally a vision model, e.g. Moondream (which Ollama supports but alternatives too), then
- take a screenshot of your game,
- write a prompt like “How can I play this game better”
- query the vision model with the image and your prompt
marvel at how pointless and costly the whole setup is and how a basic query on e.g. DuckDuckGo with “game name” + prompt would yield way WAY better results from actual human, uninstall the whole, keep on playing with your actual brain.
At least now you can say you tried before you complain, rightfully, that it sucks.
For more check https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence
PS: I didn’t actually try this, I’m too lazy for that right how but feel free to report back if you do!
Edit : 2 potential optimization (despite not being sure it ever makes sense in the first place!)
- do so automatically, e.g. ~/gaming_screenshots directory (via e.g.
Spectacleshortcut) monitored viainotifythennotify-sendthe suggestion, thus stay in game during the whole process - fine tune on specific visual datasets, e.g. rely on fextra as mentioned in https://lemmy.world/post/37758804/20113877
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Spot on, it’s a variation of the “Robots were supposed to clean the house why I make art, not the other way around” meme and arguably Moravec’s paradox.
That’s great we really need to get the AIs playing the game for me so I’ll have more time to spend on things I enjoy: like standing in the bread line.
such stupid thing to sell that spyware with, makes me think of earlier people “buying” gold and gems from natives for worthless baubles because they didnt know better about value of either. And even if it doesn’t gather any information you care about someone taking, its still taking something valuable for no compensation > the training data and information in general that might be of use to someone at least and thus makes microsoft more money.
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Online connection? So I remove the internet from the thing and it just doesn’t work? Easy fix.
If you’re going to air gap it, there are better windows operating systems than 11
It isn’t air gapped, I just have a program that can block internet access to anything running. My internet is bad enough I can tell when something is using almost anything, and I’ve blocked most windows processes. It’s just another check box to click
I hope microsoft is ready to train copilot on hours and hours of cloud meadow.
