Great idea! I've been humorously referring to chat agents as next gen Clippy because of their chipper, talky default personas which I find insufferably annoying.
I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI. Really a huge miss on their part because I hate the overbearingly intrusive way they keep forcing it into their OS, apps and my fucking laptop keyboard. If they at least acknowledged their behavior and owned it (with a sly wink), I'd hate it a little less. I might even be up for a "Clippy is my CoPilot" sticker on my laptop (calling back to the old 80s "Jesus is my Copilot" bumper stickers).
> I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI.
Seriously! This makes me think nobody at Microsoft with the authority to approve something like that has a sense of humor and/or good business sense. The nostalgia would be enormous. Hell I'm a linux person now and I'd install Clippy if it supported Fedora
Clippy was a laughing stock and target of derisive comedy for years. It has such bad brand recognition that nobody should be surprised that they aren’t using it.
While true, it turned into a cultural phenomena, a close inspiration even showed up in Cyberpunk 2077 as an AI gun. So if MS would have revitalized it, it could have been done in a self ironic way to show some personality and taste and not be a cold, calculated money machine.
> in a self ironic way to show some personality and taste and not be a cold, calculated money machine.
You posted that, and someone at Microsoft unwittingly twitched.
I think that is what makes it a humor goldmine.
Clippy was useless.
But attaching a Clippy to a language model? Still nominally useless, but mindfully so!
It would be self-deprecating (un-deprecated???) humor for Microsoft, which would take the edge off of the often pushy and tone-deaf corporate look they continually and crassly paint themselves into by default.
And actually potentially useful as a branding touchstone: a visual and interface link across otherwise seemingly disparate model interfaces. Clearly delineating and bridging MS AI tools from all the other mixes of tools we are accumulating.
They could lean into the “clip” in Clippy with a side app for saving and organizing clippings and logs of notable interactions with any MS model, akin to a notes app. With features for compressing convos into compact topic cheat sheets (with retained sources & convos), lists and other helpful info gathering and leveraging tasks.
An ongoing accumulated compressed common core of context for both (hu)man and machine, er … Clippy.
Clippy's popups were useless, but his chat interface actually worked fine (within the domian of MS office questions) things like "how do I add page numbers" or "count the paragraphs in my document")
The pre-clippy natural language help in MS word worked fine too. Chatbot interfaces that work fine are nothing new, it's just very few programs are complex and open-ended enough for them to be a reasonable UI -- but a full-featured word processor probably is
But pushy and tone-deaf is what they are. Unless they change their whole corporate structure for this, it’d be equally tone-deaf for someone from their marketing department to pretend that Microsoft is hip and self-aware now. Better to be honest.
I get the strange feeling you wouldn’t be happy with “New Clippy’s” occasional off topic purchase recommendations!
I remember Clippy, but I don't remember why it was annoying. I am thinking that Robert Brooke's 3 laws of robotics applies here. (He had written one for AI but I think his thoughts on robotics are more relavent to AI agents).
I think it was the modal dialog box that forced you to stop what you were doing and click 'piss off clippy', rather than being able to ignore it.
Additionally, there was an option that was on by default to use Clippy in place of confirmation dialogs. You'd try to close an unsaved file and instead of the usual Windows dialog you'd get Clippy asking whether you'd like to save changes instead.
So going by https://rodneybrooks.com/rodney-brooks-three-laws-of-robotic...
That would be violating the second design principle:
"When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times."
With a physical robot, if it fails and freezes, it turns into a hazard.
With Clippy, it intrusively stops humans from being able to do what they are doing.
It tends to randomly barge into your UI when you thought you dismissed/disabled it. And never provides any useful information or suggestions.
"It looks like you’re trying to write a term paper at 2am the night before it’s due, do you want me to just put out some LLM slop and hope for the best?"
It should at least have been an April fools joke. “Microsoft renames copilot for MS word as Clippy’s Pilot”
It was, but as someone without a dog in the hunt, I loved that ol' Clipmeister.
Especially the old 'suicide note' joke image... guess would be called a meme today.
clippy was also quite helpful though, as a kid with no idea what stuff i could do with Word.
its just that it outlived its welcome quickly, once i learned everything that i needed. the lesson to learn is i think about how to move from that guided experience into more power tools
Who can remember clippy right click "animate"?
That, wordart, and the secret flight sim in Excel 97 were the entirety of how I spent my school days.
I think it was not funny to people trying to get work done. But that generation is retired now. The current generation is the one that were typing essays in Word and were too early to steal MP3s, so they had to use Clippy as the distraction.
They did though, I swear it was in a presentation you could select clippy as an avatar.
Edit: yes found it.
[1] https://windowsreport.com/with-copilot-avatar-microsoft-will...
clicked this link on mobile and every page scroll caused another malicious ad redirect (??) there's also a huge bouncing "remove ads" button with an X that opens an advert in the background. can't tell if the ads are on purpose or if the owners have just ticked every ad network box
You're not wrong, but both mullvad's free DNS base filter (here: https://github.com/mullvad/encrypted-dns-profiles ) and Wipr blocked it on my iphone. Android just use ublock origin with firefox or another variant.
Genuine question, if you're willing to indulge me: Why aren't you using ad-blocking of one type or another?
(Assumption: You're tech literate, given the audience of this website. So I tend to assume it must be a conscious decision not to use adblocking)
I don't browse without it these days.
> mobile
i have ublock origin on my pc and macbook. trying firefox mobile with ublock but it's still habit to open chrome on my phone
Strong recommend for Android, Firefox and uBlock Origin
I also have these Extensions:
ClearURLs
Decentraleyes
Privacy Badger
I still don't care about cookiesPrivacy Badger and UBlock Origin don't work well together, and LocalCDN is better than Decentraleyes
Nah, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin do work well together.
You may think that, but no, they don't - and both authors of both apps state so.
What's happening is you are not getting any clear errors so you think that's the case, but you're running an inefficient setup without any doubt.
>both authors of both apps state so.
I am Privacy Badger's author.
https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
Wow, I apologize, and very interesting! This is some sort of tech version of mansplaining, I guess, lesson learned!
I was certain on the PB github or something there was something saying not to use it with uBlock, and likewise on gorhills github, but maybe it was a mandella effect or something.
In any case, thanks for the clarification and humbling.
Hey, that's such a nice response, I appreciate it.
I think the thing on uBO's side is here on https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock :
>Do NOT use uBO with any other content blocker. uBO performs as well as or better than most popular blockers. Other blockers can prevent uBO's privacy or anti-blocker-defusing features from working correctly.
My perspective:
- uBO is good enough by itself
- PB is good enough by itself
- uBO comes with unique features
- PB comes with unique features
- While using uBO with PB may indeed cause some problems like anti-blocker-defusing features to break, it doesn't seem like a big deal for most people
- uBO alone is good, PB alone is good, uBO + PB is also good
Sorry didn't notice, it was the top google result. I have ublock origin and firefox so I tend not to see many ads.
>I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI.
I attribute this to the fact that big corporations like Microsoft have so much bureaucracy and moving cogs that even something as simple as a request to reuse a UI element like Clippy would be stuck between the cogs forever.
There's a lot of missed opportunities out there. For example, AskJeeves is still just a vanilla search engine (Google front-end).
That kind of sucks, because there's AI LLM's just about everywhere else now. Even those customer service "live chat" windows are typically AI first. What are Ask Jeeves doing?
I'm firmly of the opinion that if they had shipped what is copilot as Cortana, they'd have seen little to no backlash.
They will. It’s a no brainer to add a visual to the personality.
They can bring back clippy, Cortana, and all the other variants, in classic or modern mode. Hell why not a BonziBuddy knockoff.
An opportunity for Carmen Sandiego as well.
Just had ChatGPT make this: https://ibb.co/pB4SPJBW
Am I right to feel wary of clicking this link? My spidy sense says 'don't do it'.
it's an ibb.co link; ibb.co is just an free online image host (the link lets you preview the uploaded image)
In a few places, Microsoft sneaks in clever references to Clippy in the Azure LLM documentation[0]. Nice to see they're still letting a bit of humor shine through here and there.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/h...
I've enjoyed honing a GPT accent of sorts to make my friends laugh, one of my favorites is re-summarizing what someone says in a smarmy way and then adding "With your understanding in x you've been playing chess while others have been merely playing checkers."
Agreed! I use Gemini and have found that I've been able to successfully shape the tone of the outputs -specifically away from the overly cheerful default by using the "saved info" section where you can basically act like a director for it.
Customers I build AI chat features for also liken it to clippy. I think it’s a very common association.
I hope you accept that likening how it is intended, and I can't imagine that being a good thing. Clippy was universally panned. To me, I wouldn't be telling people that the thing I'm spending time working on was received as this generation's Clippy.
When talking with them I was surprised because they seemed to be invoking his name positively.
I’d much rather talk to Clippy than Cortana.
I really can’t stand their brain dead appropriation of AI - first Cortana, which they stole from Halo, now CoPilot, which they stole from GitHub (and should have been named Cod*e*Pilot anyway) -
Clippy is right there!!