- Microsoft’s campaign to remove AI from Windows 11 has begun
- 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 hasn’t gone well.
Microsoft has begun the process of removing AI from Windows 11, which at first glance is good news for many, but the problem is that one of the first moves made here is disappointingly minor in nature.
Windows Latest noted that Copilot has been completely removed from Snipping Tool, and this is for all Windows 11 users. Additionally, there has been a change for Notepad, although it is still in testing, and this is where things get more complicated.
This is because in the case of the preview version of Notepad, all that has been removed is the Copilot icon. AI tools remain in the text editor; it’s just that they’re now called “writing tools” and are accompanied by a new icon, which is just a generic graphic of a pen (and it’s not colored, like the Copilot button, so it’s much more subtle).
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In other words, it’s about getting rid of the Copilot branding, but not the actual AI functionality of Notepad (in testing).
As you can imagine, the reaction to this has not been favorable. As one Redditor says: “So it’s still Copilot, just dressed up and called writing tools.”
Someone else observes: “Yes, this feels less like a removal and more like a rebrand to reduce negative reactions.”
And another Redditor laments: “The world is no longer about reality. It has completely shifted towards ‘optics’.”
Others have been, shall we say, much less diplomatic than that, pointing profanity-laden posts at the company, peppered with the obligatory ‘Microslop’ insinuations (which are very trendy, of course, among Windows 11 cynics).
Here’s a more measured example of one such comment: “You can rename your garbage tools all you want, but I already switched to CachyOS a year ago.” (CachyOS is a snappy 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 simply renaming them Copilot, it clearly won’t be well received. We don’t know if this is the company’s plan yet, but what happened here suggests that removing AI will involve completely removing some features (like in Snipping Tool) and some rebranding (like with Notepad).
So the suggestion that anti-AI folks are already picking up on is that the campaign to tone down Copilot in Windows 11 might be a lot more literal than we thought (removing just the Copilot name and icon in some cases) and therefore that Microsoft isn’t completely serious about this task. Hence the comments about this being more of a marketing exercise for Microsoft than anything else.
While I admit that the decision with Notepad here seems somewhat sinister, I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that this will just be a public relations campaign by Microsoft. After all, this Notepad tweak is still in testing and there may still be more changes to come.
While it seems unlikely that a full AI removal from Notepad is being planned, given what happened here, we can’t rule it out just yet. Or, in fact, maybe Microsoft will change things and disable AI by default. That would mean that the new writing tools icon wouldn’t be in the top menu bar, unless you looked for AI features in the settings and enabled them.
For now, you can still turn off the AI features in Notepad, whether they’re called Copilot or writing tools, and that’s still the option to exercise if you never use them (or if you completely hate AI).
Let’s be real, though: AI haters won’t be happy until this feature is completely removed from Notepad (which is what many expected would happen). The same is true for die-hard Notepad users who want the text editor to be more like the stripped-down effort it was in the past, before Microsoft started bulking it up (read: bloating it) with more features. All of these bits of functionality remain in the background and add up to become potential drag factors on overall performance and responsiveness, or that is certainly the concern.
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