To replicate it, in Word 365, insert a photo which is stored on your own hard drive and then right click it and choose View Alt Text. In my case the Alt text was already filled out and it said
Quote:
A group of people posing on a tree trunk
Description automatically generated with low confidence
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It does also have a mention of 'Powered by Office Services' down the bottom of that task pane.
If I look at the image properties before I inserted it, I can see title/subject metadata that says "Kids on a giant log at Echuca on the Murray River" so the Alt text 'could' have been inferred from that property locally but it clearly isn't a direct copy of that metadata. There could be other metadata that I haven't seen in Windows file properties dialog which could have provided a direct input. If images are 'on your hard drive' but also backed up onto Apple's, Microsoft's or Google's cloud data stores, do they get metadata added which can be harvested later or used in image searches?
So I would question what other metadata is stored with your images and what was the original source of that information. If you take a photo with an Android or Apple phone, does that get processed/saved online instantly to insert metadata that can later be harvested by the 'Office Services' engine? This would not surprise me at all.
What if you took photos in Airplane mode and transferred the image to the computer without connecting back to your phone's data? Would that stop metadata being added to the image and stop "Office Services" from being able to magic up some Alt text?
This is definitely worth investigating further for corporate environments with a cyber focus.