- Microsoft’s campaign to remove AI from Windows 11 has begun
- The Snipping Tool and Notepad apps have seen some changes
- However, the Notepad tweak doesn’t remove the AI features, it just renames them Copilot – and that didn’t go over well.
Microsoft has started the process of removing AI from Windows 11, which is good news on the face of it for many, but the problem is that one of the first steps taken here is disappointing in nature.
Windows Latest has noticed that Copilot has been completely removed from Snipping Tool, and this applies to all Windows 11 users. On top of that, there has been a change for Notepad, although this is still in testing, and this is where things get complicated.
Indeed, in the case of the preview version of Notepad, all that has been abandoned is the Copilot icon itself. AI tools remain in the text editor; it’s just that they’re now called “writing tools” and come with a new icon, which is just a generic graphic of a pen (and isn’t colored, like the Copilot button, so it’s much more subtle).
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In other words, it’s dropping the Copilot branding, but not Notepad’s actual AI functionality (under testing).
As you can imagine, the reaction was not favorable. As one Reddit user says: “So it’s still Copilot, just disguised as writing tools.”
Someone else observes: “Yes, this seems less like a removal and more like a rebranding to reduce backlash.” »
And another Redditor laments that: “The world is no longer about reality. He switched entirely to “optics”. »
Others have been, shall we say, much less diplomatic than that, sending swear-laden messages to the company, peppered with obligatory “Microslop” digs (which are very fashionable, of course, among Windows 11 cynics).
Here’s a smaller example of one of those comments: “They can rename their slop tools all they want, but I already switched to CachyOS a year ago.” (CachyOS is a dynamic Linux distribution, in case you were wondering).
Analysis: a half-hearted effort?
If Microsoft’s idea of removing AI from Windows 11 involves simply leaving the actual tools in place and rebranding them outside of Copilot, it clearly won’t be well received. We don’t know yet if this is the company’s plan, but what happened here suggests that removing AI will involve abandoning some features entirely (like in Snipping Tool) and some rebranding (like with Notepad).
The suggestion that anti-AI people already understand is that the campaign to tone down Copilot in Windows 11 might be much more literal than we thought (removing just the Copilot name and icon in some cases), and therefore that Microsoft isn’t really serious about this task. Therefore, comments about this are more of a marketing exercise for Microsoft than anything else.
While I admit that the Notepad decision seems somewhat worrying, I’m not about to conclude that this will just be a PR campaign from Microsoft. After all, this Notepad change is still being tested and more changes could still be coming.
While it seems unlikely that a complete removal of Notepad AI would be on the cards, given what happened here, we can’t rule it out just yet. Or, indeed, maybe Microsoft will change things and turn off AI by default. This would mean that the new writing tools icon wouldn’t be in the top menu bar at all, unless you looked for the AI features in the settings and turned them on.
For now, you can still turn off the AI features in Notepad – whether they’re called Copilot or Writing Tools – and it’s still the option to exercise them if you never use them (or if you just plain hate AI).
However, let’s be real: AI detractors won’t be happy until this feature is completely removed from Notepad (which many expected). The same goes for Notepad’s most diehard users who wish the text editor was more like the streamlined effort it was back in the day, before Microsoft started bloating it (read bloating it) with more features. All of these features sit in the background and cumulatively add up to potential factors in slowing down performance and overall responsiveness, or that’s certainly the problem.
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