Would you love this after three martinis? (Patrick Aventurier/Getty)


January 25, 2025   5 mins

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.”

“It shows utter contempt both for Microsoft’s customers and for the spirit of contract law.”

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.


Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator. His latest book is The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading.
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