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.
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 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).
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.
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 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?"
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
Comic Sans was a laughing stock and a target of derisive comedy, but now it can be used ironically, or in the case of Comic Mono, very straight faced as well.
Do it on April 1. With a “we told you so” tagline. Have a few 2025/6 templates, like writing a presidential executive order because there are so many of them.
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.
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.
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.
>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
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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) -
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).