Would you love this after three martinis? (Patrick Aventurier/Getty)
Remember “Clippy”? This was the “virtual assistant” that popped up whenever you were using Microsoft Word back around the turn of the millennium. You’d be in your word processor, minding your own business, and when you typed the word “Dear” and then someone’s name, this goggly-eyed paperclip would pop up on screen and say: “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” And at that point, you’d stop writing a letter and waste 45 minutes trying to figure out how to turn Clippy off, for good, ideally with napalm.
Since, as far as Big Tech is concerned, no crap idea is so crap that it can’t be tried again, and learning from your mistakes is for losers, Clippy is back. He’s now called Copilot. And not only is he just as repulsively irritating as his predecessor, he’s also costing you a lot of money without you, probably, even realising. But, of course, this time he’s better. He’s not just a shit algorithm: he’s a shit algorithm with the magic fairy dust of AI.
There will be many genuinely transformative uses of AI. I yield to nobody in my excitement at what AI will be able to do when it comes to protein-folding. But the need among credulous and overexposed venture capitalists to make money out of it at a retail level — because they’ve bet the farm on something they thought sounded like the future after a three-martini lunch — means that this wasteful and unreliable and basically useless technology is being forced into any number of situations where there’s no need for it and it’s actively annoying or, sometimes, dangerous.
There’s a good meme about it, which shows a small girl pinned against the wall of a school corridor by a tuba jammed into her face. The victim is labelled “Me”; the tuba is labelled “Unwanted AI”; and the person holding the tuba is labelled “Every Company”.
I subscribe, as very many hundreds of thousands, probably even millions, of people around the world do, to a software package called Microsoft 365. That gives me access to online versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and other programmes that let me get on with my work. It’s a fair deal. They’re good programmes. I don’t mind a bit paying £80 a year or so for family access to Microsoft’s suite of stuff. It’s a lot less fiddly than buying a boxed package of Word every couple of years and downloading it onto your computer from CDs.
About a week ago, when I opened a new document, I was presented not with a nice blank page but with a hovering header asking me — Jesus wept — whether I wanted to “draft an itinerary for a college reunion in London” or “write a bedtime story for an eight-year-old about dinosaurs”. I spent the traditional 45 minutes Googling “how do I kill Copilot?”, and similar, to no avail (a friend who asked Copilot how you turn Copilot off was told politely that — fancy! — this was something Copilot couldn’t help with). Even as I write these words, a little blue and magenta icon follows my cursor down the page in the left-hand margin suggesting “Draft with Copilot: (Alt+I)”.
It was only when I grumbled about this on social media that I discovered that this wasn’t just an annoyance, but a grift. I had a nice response from someone seeming to be a Microsoft employee reassuring me that, no, Copilot wasn’t stealing my data and that turning it off was just a matter of finding the right checkbox in this or that options menu. But I also had a response from someone saying, and I think it’s only fair to credit him by quoting his unimprovable explanation in full: “Microsoft is going to price gouge you by adding their genAI to your subscription without your consent, and they are not transparent about how to avoid this bullshit.”
He explained that any and all subscribers to Office 365 have been quietly moved, on an increased annual rate, to the AI-enhanced version of the product. The only way to change it is to log in to your Microsoft account, cancel your subscription altogether, and resubscribe to the “classic” version. You must be joking, I thought. And then I followed his instructions, and not a word of it was a lie. In case anyone’s interested, here’s the link he sent me.
I have been, all of us have been, without so much as asking me, “upgraded” (aka, in the excellent formulation of the tech writer Cory Doctorow, “enshittified”) to a version of a programme I paid for which contains features I neither need nor want. Those features, if what we’re told about the resource greediness of AI is correct, are colossally wasteful of computing power and damaging to the environment. They are (given AI’s extreme unreliability when it comes to real-world outcomes), at the very best experimental or unpredictable. And the functioning of the features is dependent (though that’s a semi-separate story) on stealing copyright material from artists and writers without asking them. And I’m being charged £25 or so more a year for the privilege. Even my email is now getting vomit-making Copilot spam. Every day brings new questions — challenges big and small. We could all use a little help. A nudge to get started or a reliable partner to get you to the finish line. No matter the moment, Copilot is your companion for every day, just because, in attempting to turn it off, I’ve interacted with Copilot.
No doubt this inertia selling is in some way legal. There’ll be something buried in the Terms and Conditions that allows them to “upgrade” you, and charge you, for this useless crap. But it shows utter contempt both for Microsoft’s customers and for the spirit of contract law. As someone who has already been charged for their supposedly enhanced subscription, and whose every interaction with his computer is now fouled by Copilot, I’d be interested to know where I apply for my refund.
This is where I suspect that Microsoft’s sharp practice is a window into a wider problem. Those venture capitalists I mentioned, they don’t work on the principle that there’s a point you could reach where there’s “enough tech”: the whole house of cards collapses if there isn’t a new big thing. Gen AI is the latest in a long series of hopeless — or limitedly applicable — ideas that are supposed to be the future (Blockchain, Web3, VR, NFTs) but into which far more investment money has been poured than is likely to be made back. So it’s being forced on us, by hype and by sleight of hand. The same issue applies to the idea, endorsed by our idiot Government, that unless writers and artists specifically object, Big Tech should be allowed to train their models on our work for free.
To hell with that. If the only way you can sell something is by hoping people won’t notice or won’t bother to object or won’t take the trouble to find out how to get rid of it, what you have isn’t a product: it’s a parasite.
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SubscribeLOL. Great article. Now let’s have an article about a credible legal strategy to force every company, who has ever forced us to pay extra for features we don’t want or need, to provide a simple one-click solution for opting out of their price-gouging chicanery. Oh, and a fifty-dollar gift certificate to boot.
Should that be “a fifty-dollar grift certificate”?
I’ve managed to avoid acquiring “Co-pilot” by workarounds which allow me all the functionality i need without Microsoft 365. Don’t know how long this state of nirvana will last; i was probably lucky in buying my latest laptop just before the software became pre-loaded, so i guess as long as the laptop lasts – plus i don’t need to share documents with an employer now.
The author also fails to add that those working for Microsoft (et al) would find themselves out of a job unless they can find ways to inveigle their useless software into our lives; to undermine out time, our patience and our bank balances. Somehow, i don’t see MAGA including those jobs alongside the DEI grifters in the bonfire of profanities.
Trump’s new masters ain’t going to agree with that!
Personally I would recommend you get off as much Big Tech as possible. Instead of Microsoft, Google etc use Linux, Brave browser, Free Office or Libre Office etc. Cheaper, just as good and generally more privacy focused. Wins all-round.
And on your Android smartphone get as many apps as possible off F-Droid.
Just be aware that some Linux distros have gone woke (yes!). To such an extent that there is now one that advertises itself as non-woke.
not just as good, even if only because everyone uses Word and Excel, and the free versions aren’t as compatible as they claim to be. So unless you are on your own, it’s not worth the hassle. You end up sending your friends .odt files that they can’t open.
….and you’re trapped in any case if you seriously use a program (Ableton in my case) that doesn’t exist in any Linux distro (as they say).
Easy enough to save your .odt files as .docx though, Andrew. And the lovely feeling you’re out from under Microsoft’s coercive subscription model and now their invasive and energy profligate AI add-on is surely worth the tiny extra effort?
You can even make .docx your default save format…
The thing about computer software is that it’s a non-consumable good, like a bank account. If I go and buy some Ring Dings, pretty soon I’m going to need more Ring Dings. But with a piece of software, once you have a copy, you don’t ever really need another one–provided it works. So to compel you to continue giving them money, software manufacturers either demand you subscribe, or release their software full of bugs, or introduce a new version every year full of features you probably don’t need. The one exception is most computer game developers–their strategy is just to release new games. But Microsoft doesn’t have that option. They’re not going to release Legends of Microsoft Office IX: Clippy’s Revenge, where you fight and kill an anthropomorphized paperclip…although given the tone of the above article, perhaps they should.
operating systems get upgraded, often to cope with new hardware, and the application software has to be upgraded to work with the new operating system. You can choose to jump ship, but not if you have subscription software
I disagree, because it seems that hardware is usually upgraded to handle the software, and the OS and application software packages are deliberately bloated to sell hardware.
I gave you a thumbs-up anyway, because the software is also often “upgraded” to take advantage of the hardware’s ability to handle bloated code. 🙂
The same thing has happened with cars. I’m expecting the next generations to have AI too…
“I see you want to park at the kebab shop again Dave. My seat sensors tell me you’re putting on weight. The NHS has an alert about fatty food. I’m sorry Dave I can’t do that.”
OK, but my name’s not Dave.
It is a movie reference. I guess you don’t call your car Hal either.
In the future, everyone will be Dave for fifteen minutes.
The Dave-elite have their own society, and claim their fifteen minutes at Davo’s.
(I’ll get my coat)
Already here. Couple of years back I had the misfortune to hire a brand new VW Golf while my car was in the garage. It came with a ‘driving assistant’ that moved the steering wheel and ticked you off if it didn’t like your line taking a bend and kept on beeping and flashing up ‘eco tips’ if it thought you hadn’t changed gear early enough, were accelerating too hard or not optimising fuel efficiency. As the car was hired, I wasn’t able to get into the onboard computer and turn the fracking thing off. I needed it for a long motorway drive and for a week had these infernal messages popping up at me when I was trying to concentrate on the road ahead. I’m in the habit of giving cars nicknames, so I christened this heap of shit Greta.
What annoys me about newer cars is the ASS — that’s the official name for automatic start-stop. I had to rent a relatively new car last summer. Where I live, my typical wait at a stop sign or traffic light is about 30 seconds, so if the engine shuts off when I stop and restarts when I relieve pressure off the brake pedal, the net savings on fuel is negligible and probably negative, but the wear on the battery and starter must eventually paid paid for. The vehicle I rented was not a VW. I hope they are not forcing ASS on people in the UK.
I have a Nissan Rogue here in the US and this obnoxious feature is thankfully optional. I keep it turned off.
I feel your pain. My beloved old car finally couldn’t makes it through her MOT and my new one frequently makes an ASS out of me when reverse parking :0( To be fair, it’s quite a nice motor otherwise.
Essential reading.
If you want to understand what AI can do enter a prompt about something you are knowlegeable about. It will respond with bland uncontentious comments that fail to enlighten you and may mislead the more ignorant. This is inevitable because its training is indiscriminately on everything written so its response is the lowest common denominator of those words, without any understanding of them. The current design of large language models can only get worse as their learning data is updated with their own output.
It is not AI, it should be called AR, automated regurgitation.
A different approach is needed,
One answer is to feed your AI base a curated diet of materials.
You wouldn’t feed your child a bit of every ingestible thing you encounter – grass, dirt, dog poo – would you?
I know what ”feed your child” means: what does “feed your AI base” mean?
When prompting an AI you can tell it to consider specific source material when formulating an answer.
T.M.’s theory is that over time, if given enough high quality source material to consider, the AI would have a ‘healthy diet’ and therefore provide better answers than an AI raised on junk.
At my workplace we have an organisational subscription to CoPilot – the idea being that it will tune itself to the specific requirements of our business.
To my knowledge the publicly facing, free AIs specifically do not retain information between sessions in order to asuage privacy concerns
A curated database helps but the intelligence comes from the curation. A company should ensure it has no bad data before replacing humans in customer service. My experience of the humans has not been good so training it on them will continue poor service with the added difficulty of its inability to explain, unless that is built into the database. It is a machine and, if used intelligently, can work as a tool to replace humans in repetitive tasks. My fear is that companies will not make that effort and will not invest in removing errors.
Chat GPT 4o tells me its learning database was last updated in October 2023. When it is updated it will inevitably include some of its own output.
Asking AI to reference particular material is helpful. But it’s the material AIs are trained on in the first place that really matters, and users can’t control that. AI has very limited memory span for what users feed it.
One of my concerns is that, as the internet becomes increasingly dominated by AI-generated material, AIs will increasingly be trained on that, rather than on human-generated material. No matter how powerful the AI engines become, it will be a nothing more than a highly sophisticated case of garbage-in-garbage-out.
on medical topics, it often tells you consult a doctor.
That at least is wise advice.
Look at it from the other side – currently it is relatively easy to tell when prose has been AI-generated, and conversely when it has been written, or at least properly edited, by a human. That is a good thing – we are in trouble when you can’t tell a robot from a human.
Great piece. I love the term “enshittified”.
Reminds me of a term in a book by David Profumo about a bad day getting worse – “undefuckable”.
Hear, hear. That annoying little icon, following you around every document like a desperate mosquito, does more to make me despise AI than want to use it.
I had to consult a more competent friend, but it’s doable, in Word at least (and for now at least):
File/options/ then Copilot (4th one down), untick enable Copilot. Might need to restart word. Might need to update windows, the facility to disable only came in latest versions.
.
All doable (and done) but you need to switch yr 365 sub to ‘Classic’ to avoid it returning. And getting a refund (as Sam Leith says) for the unwanted ‘upgrade’ is sensationally tough – and a perfect window into the dark nastiness of MS business practice.
I find copilot pretty useful, but then I’m a software developer, and you’d expect that to be one area where an AI should be helpful.
Thank you so much! I’d registered the annoying prompts but hadn’t connected the threads. So following the steps in the thread you posted I managed to successfully return to the pre – Copilot version of Office (on the second attempt I made sure to open the command manager in Administrator mode and copy and paste the lines and boom! The download and installation happened in the background so quite painless! I the went into my Office365 account and changed the subscription back to classic, saving myself about $50 AUD a year.
More like a tapeworm.
Microsoft (Bill Gates) has always sold substandard, buggy software. These latest versions are at least freely upgradeable unlike the earlier iterations. Bill Gates has now re-invented himself as a medical expert and is busy trying to depopulate the world by killing people. In essence the creature is far better at murder than at software design. Dodgy market salesman made good. Del-boy without the charm or humour.
The author must be an idiot. It is incredible easy to turn off copilot. Settings>Copilot>on or off, pick off. It took one google search and less than a minute to do it.
Don’t be rude. The author is not an idiot; navigating complex software is typically an arcane skill.
This was actually NOT possible (in MS Word) until a couple of days after Copilot was introduced. The tab simply was not there, and there were massive complaints to Microsoft. It is still not possible in PowerPoint.
Personally, I doubt whether turning if off actually does turn it off. I strongly suspect it keeps running in the background.
Let’s then call it parasitic intelligence instead of artificial intelligence.
“what you have isn’t a product: it’s a parasite.”
If you have a competent friend to install it (assuming that you’re not an IT professional) it is possible to run Linux and Open Office. I’ll be doing this soon as my laptop is too old for Windows 11, but works fine. As others have noted, you don’t need a new or ‘better’ word processor once you have one that meets your needs.
IMHO, almost all software “upgrades” are unnecessary. For example, the latest version of MS Word does not do anything for me that Word version 2.0 would not do. The catch is that Word ver 2.0 (I still have a copy & a license) does not run on Windows 7 or later, and relatively recent versions of Windows are needed to run browsers which in turn are needed for access to almost any web site.
I offer two suggestions.
Instead of buying download-and-install versions of MS Office as an alternative to subscription software, switch to Libre Office and install it locally. It costs much less and has about the same functionality.
My second suggestion, which is much more difficult, is to switch OS’s to get away from the Microsoft monopoly.
I live in the USA, and we are able to buy locally-installed MS Office (apparently it is not available in the UK). Personally, I only use the Microsoft database (MS Access), and I’ve not upgraded my other (locally-installed) MS Office software.
But I’m taking my own advice & using Libre Office for all but the database work.
I’ve tried switching to Linux and decided not to take my advice on the second proposal just yet. (LOL)
I greatly enjoyed this article and the comments.
Here is an article discussion an issue over use of AI in editing scientific articles for paper & online publication. https://johnhawks.net/weblog/a-sad-end-for-the-journal-of-human-evolution/
Huh? I have never been bothered with Copilot, suggestions of any kind, or anything like that. I click on the Copilot icon fairly often, type in a query, and get good advice every time. It rewrites emails, gathers needed information, offer amusing observations, and allows me to perceive my own biases more clearly (since it never takes a side, but only gives information, of greater or lesser quality). It’s like having a personal assistant.
Full disclosure – I use Edge and Bing for most browsing (better for business purposes, in my view), and use Chrome only when forced to (a rare occurence). I find that Google’s products are better for the casual user, Microsoft’s product being better for the business user. Y’alls’ thoughts?
My comment is that my emails always say exactly what I want them to say, and thus cannot be “improved”.
Mine also.
Amen to this. And you can throw in the over-kill in new cars too! Abhore all the extra features telling me how to drive and scaring the bejesus out of me slamming on breaks on a soft corner when it thinks I should be slower by even a 1 degree margin. I declare!
Amen to the “cars” comment. In my day we dealt with the “too fast into corner” thing by winding on some opposite lock, and standing on the “loud pedal”.
…best you stick with the kiddie stuff I reckon Sam.
Makes me glad I never signed up for Microsoft 365. I had a message the other day from someone who “wanted to tell me what AI could do for my legal practice”. I assured him that AI would do nothing of value for my legal practice in my lifetime. He asked why I said that. I said that it was because IT Nerds were utterly clueless about what real people (namely non-IT Nerds) actually needed or wanted, as evidenced by the fact that they had been utterly incapable of even designing a workable legal document management system, despite 20 years of trying.
See also Adobe.
45 minutes? it took me 20 seconds to find out how to switch-off Co-Pilot in Word, and to actually do it. I googled “how to disable copilot in Word?”. The top result showed clear instructions ( 3 steps, where the first is “open Word”).
These 2025 AI assistants are really deep surveillance tools that con be used to do an end-run around encryption. What do you think all those huge power-hungry data-centres are all about. This problem is not confined to Microsoft. Apple is doing it too.
Local processors are now powerful enough to do all the needed AI processing locally without requiring internet access to function. Yet that is not what is on offer.
This surreptitious surveillance masquerading as convenience AI assistance should be outlawed with punitive damages available for the breach of privacy. Reestablish INFORMED CONSENT as the standard for enforceability of contract provisions and liability waivers.
Why is this happening? Because we are techno serfs and the Big Tech bros are our feudal overlords- until the unsustainable system all comes crashing down.
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