Don’t Let Microsoft’s New Copilot Take the Controls of Your Writing Journey!

Send this AI “helper” to the baggage compartment where it belongs.

Welcome to Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft’s 21st century version of “Clippy” — screencapture by Author

I confess. I am among the old-school, curmudgeonly writers increasingly disturbed by artificial intelligence's gradual, persistent encroachment into the experience, technology, and day-to-day business of writing.

This is why I was very disturbed this morning to find a new AI widget attached to my cursor on Microsoft Word, doggedly beckoning me to use the new Copilot AI engine to complete my writing project instead of my own brain.

I cannot be alone in feeling that the rich diversity of human expression that was once disseminated and preserved in the written word (and which is essential to the nourishment of the human spirit) is being systematically homogenized and drained of vitality by the “helpful”, real-time AI-driven grammatical notifications that now flash on our screens while we are typing.

Admittedly, I’m a word-processing dinosaur. My first word-processing program was Newscript, which I happily typed on a RadioShack TRS-80 that used a black and white TV as a monitor and audio cassettes for memory storage. Then came WordStar (on my beloved TRS 80 Model 4) and WordPerfect 2.0 (on a succession of DOS desktops). None of these programs had any grammar or spell-check, which was fine with me. As with my trusty Olivetti typewriter, these writing tools enhanced the flow and efficiency of my writing without intrusion, distraction, or influence on my creative writing process.

My beloved TRS-80 Model 4 P — Photo by Wikipedia

Microsoft introduced AutoCorrect in 1993, which brought spell check to word processing. The red scriggles it painted on my typos were a bit distracting, but it was a welcome compromise when I needed to file letter-perfect legal briefs under sadistically tight deadlines.

But then, in 1997, Microsoft debuted Clippy, the famously annoying and distracting tool that continuously popped up in my Word and Excel documents offering advice and suggestions that I didn’t need and never asked for. I disabled Clippy it as quickly as I could, and Microsoft eventually sent him to the…