Windows 11, now with even more “AI” where you don’t want it

Microsoft has posted a blog post about detailing its latest round of additions to Windows 11, and as will surely not surprise you, it’s “AI”, all the time, whether you like it or not. I’m not even going to detail most of these “features”, as I’m sure most of them will just become yet another series of checkboxes on whatever debloating tool you prefer. Still, there’s one recurring theme running throughout Microsoft’s recent “AI” marketing that really stands out, and this blog post is no different:

Until now, the power of AI has often been gated behind your skill at prompting.  The more context you provide and detail you share, the richer response you receive in return. But typing it out can be tedious and time consuming, especially if it takes multiple tries to get it right.

With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier.
↫ Yusuf Mehdi at the Windows Blogs

“You’re holding it wrong” has become a recurring meme whenever someone places the blame for a shit product on its users, but we’re really starting to see this line of thinking explode with “AI” tools now. If you’re getting bad, wrong, or downright made up results out of your text generator – which happens all the time – the problem isn’t that the text generator is shit; no, the problem is that the user is shit at manipulating and coercing it into generating the right string of words.

This is a major problem for “AI” companies, as the obtuseness of input and the inevitable shoddiness of results is most likely putting users off using them, and if there’s one thing these companies needs, it’s users. All of them are hemorrhaging money without any realistic paths towards profitability, so there’s a mad scramble to convince and trick people into using “AI” tools, and every single recent effort by Microsoft regarding Windows and Office is 100% geared towards this goal. That’s why nothing is sacred, and everything from Notepad to Paint, from the the Windows Start menu to context menus, from the Explorer file manager to your Windows command line is getting Copilot buttons and sparkly icons: Microsoft has to be able to brag about “AI” user numbers to keep the scam going.

As the bubble gets bigger and bigger, and as we come closer and closer to that satisfying pop, you can expect ever more places in Windows to get “AI” features. I can’t wait for the sparkle icon to show up when formatting a disk, installing a driver through Device Manager, or during a kernel panic. I can’t wait for the blue screen of death to open a Copilot chat that advises you to do something utterly unrelated.

You can do it, Microsoft.