Microsoft’s Copilot – an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Microsoft’s Copilot – an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Microsoft Copilot

You’ve probably heard about OpenAI’s free version of ChatGPT, perhaps you’ve used it yourself. As with many online services today, by way of “clickwrap,” you agree to OpenAI’s terms and conditions when you create an account to use their services. Like other “free” services, you – the end user – end up being the product. For instance, according to their privacy policy, by using OpenAI’s free ChatGPT service you are allowing them to use your contributions to make their products better (e.g. train/improve their models).

If you want to throw caution into the wind in your personal life (not advisable), we’d say “to each their own” or “you do you, boo,” however, there are many folks across Minnesota State who want to be sure their data is being protected and want to be assured that the terms and conditions of the tools and services they use comply with Minnesota State Board of Trustees Policies and Procedures.

One such tool we’d encourage you to explore or assign students to use, would be Microsoft’s Copilot (formerly Bing Chat Enterprise) available at https://copilot.microsoft.com/ 
When you log in to the web version of Copilot with your Minnesota State credentials (StarID@minnstate.edu or StarID@go.minnstate.edu), Microsoft is held to the terms and conditions for similar services provided through Microsoft 365. After signing in, you should be alerted that your data is protected.



Both ChatGPT and Copilot uses “generative pre-trained transformers,” a type of large language model. At the time of this writing, when marked as protected, Copilot will not save your chat history, while the free version of ChatGPT will. Additionally, using the DALL-E 3 model, Copilot allows users to generate images, the free version of ChatGPT does not.

Adapted from the original by Scott Wojtanowski

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