Microsoft's upcoming desktop AI is a pop-up away from becoming an even more annoying Clippy

pcgamer.com:

Clippy was the worst. The little Office assistant would obnoxiously appear at the side of your screen while you were writing a Word document and have the gall to ask to help you out. Get a life, mate. Thankfully, Microsoft murdered Clippy in cold blood early on in the new Millennium.

Since then we've had Clippy unleashed on the desktop, known as Cortana, Microsoft's attempt at a smarter assistant, and I loathed that nearly as much. At least you could mostly disable it. And even though that brand has largely been swept under the rug now, it's seemingly being replaced by a new assistant, and this one is powered by AI.

Microsoft has announced a new thing called Windows Copilot, an AI assistant that lives on the desktop and will answer questions about Windows features and settings, suggest playlists, summarise documents, and even send people things in Teams. In Microsoft's teaser, it's seen to pop out from the right side of the screen, inviting users to «ask me anything…»

Windows Copilot will integrate Bing Chat, powered by ChatGPT, and ChatGPT itself, which is a double dose of natural language processing.

There's clearly an accessibility use for this new personal assistant and similar technologies, and if it makes surfing the desktop easier or faster for some, fantastic. The video teaser from Microsoft demonstrating the new feature, arriving from June, actually makes it look pretty decent—if you're into that sort of smart functionality. I definitely don't want an AI recommending me music, and already use the Windows search bar to quickly find apps, but each to their own.

But you just know Microsoft is going to aggressively push this new AI assistant onto the desktop, and that's not what worries me most.

If this ever pops-up