Clippy, the dead are walking again

Here we go again. If there was ever time to use this phrase, it is now. On the last day of summer 2023, Microsoft announced the launch of Microsoft Copilot, your “everyday AI companion.”

To set the context for this supposed next big thing, let's go back to the release of Microsoft Office 97, when the Office Assistant, also billed as an intelligent user interface, was introduced. The purpose? To assist and provide help when users run into issues while using Microsoft products.

It's a rare feat for a product to become a universal object of disdain and hate, but Clippy (as the Office Assistant was informally dubbed) nailed it with spectacular flair. Smithsonian Magazine declared Clippy "one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing", while Time magazine included Clippy in a 2010 list of the 50 worst inventions, giving it a respectable third place.

But that was then and this is now. This time, we have AI.

After sifting through the latest announcement, it becomes glaringly obvious that if anything is working at Microsoft, it is always the marketing department, which somehow manages to portray a clear disaster in the making as some amazing technological feat.

Here are the highlights:

“With the convergence of chat interfaces and large language models you can now ask for what you want in natural language and the technology is smart enough to answer, create it or take action.” Wrong. There is no such thing as 'smart technology'. It is perpetuated nonsense. Also, don't forget that Large Language Models (LLM) are prone to hallucinations and nobody knows why.

“Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront. ..."  Somehow the words 'intelligence of the web', 'privacy' and 'security' made it to the same sentence.

“Bing will add support for the latest DALL.E 3 model from OpenAI and deliver more personalized answers based on your search history, ...' - And I thought that 'privacy' was at the forefront. But Microsoft is storing your search history, so that doesn’t add up.

But enough nitpicking over marketing fluff. Let's see where and how we can use Copilot.

According to Microsoft, the first apps that will feature Copilot include Paint, Photos, Snipping Tool, Clipchamp, and Notepad. Specifically in Notepad, Copilot “will start automatically saving your session state allowing you to close Notepad without any interrupting dialogs and then pick up where you left off when you return. Notepad will automatically restore previously open tabs as well as unsaved content and edits across those open tabs.” It makes you think - did we really have to spend billions of dollars on building AI when even the barely usable Microsoft Word has had an Auto Save function for a couple of years now?

So far, all we've learned is that Microsoft is bringing the functionality of its most trivial tools in line with the rest of the market. What's next?

“Bing and Edge are redefining how we interact with the web - personalized answers. Now, your chat history can inform your results. For example, if you’ve used Bing to track your favorite soccer team, next time you’re planning a trip it can proactively tell you if the team is playing in your destination city. If you prefer responses that don’t use your chat history, you can turn this feature off in Bing settings."

Are you tired of ad retargeting, where visiting a website once means its offerings will now show up on every website you visit? Good news: with Microsoft, this will now become part of every search. Don't like it? I'm sure it will be among the many settings you can adjust in Bing. However, there's a limit to personalized answers. Once they become too personalized, it starts to feel creepy.

Last, but not least: the extra bonus for the Enterprise users.

“Microsoft 365 Chat combs across your entire universe of data at work, including emails, meetings, chats, documents and more, plus the web. Like an assistant, it has a deep understanding of you, your job, your priorities and your organization.”

That assumes that all the emails, meetings, chats and documents are business related. Remember, no more sending pictures of cute cats around. But what is more alarming is that through your office credentials, Microsoft will have access to all the confidential documents. Microsoft is borrowing the marketing tagline from Intel: “Microsoft inside [your organization]”.

While we’re at it, let’s look at one more “feature.”

“[Microsoft] Teams users globally are in three times more meetings each week than they were in 2020 ...  Microsoft 365 Chat tames the complexity, eliminates the drudgery and helps you reclaim time at work.”

Yes, introducing technology that creates a workload overflow and misery for everyone is supposedly solved by introducing new technology. Don’t worry—this time, it will surely work!

The recurrent pattern? Microsoft’s lack of imagination, lack of innovation and its propensity for introducing products which are not production ready. This creates an illusion for the end user that the product is useful, but it is a nightmare for the IT departments who have to deal with the consequences.