Microsoft has begun stripping out AI from Windows 11 — but it's already being criticized for not going far enough | Tech Radar

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Microsoft has begun stripping out AI from Windows 11 — but it's already being criticized for not going far enough

Al removal blitz is simply a case of 'rebranding to reduce backlash'?

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Microsoft's drive to remove AI from Windows 11 has started

The Snipping Tool and Notepad apps have seen some changes

However, the Notepad tweak doesn't remove the AI features, it just rebrands them away from Copilot – and that hasn't gone down well

Microsoft has begun the process of removing AI from Windows 11, which is good news on the face of it for many, but the catch is that one of the first moves made here is disappointingly minor in its nature.

Windows Latest noticed that Snipping Tool has had Copilot completely removed from it, and this is for all Windows 11 users. On top of that, there's been a change for Notepad, although this is still in testing, and it's where things get more complicated.

That's because in the case of the preview version of Notepad, all that's been ditched is the Copilot icon itself. The 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 isn't colored, like the Copilot button, so it is a lot more subtle).

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In other words, this is about ditching the Copilot branding, but not the actual AI functionality from Notepad (in testing).

As you might imagine, the reaction to this has not been favorable. As one Redditor puts it: "So it's still Copilot, just in disguise and called writing tools."

Someone else observes: "Yeah, this feels less like removal and more like rebranding to reduce backlash."

And another Redditor laments that: "The world is no longer about reality. It's fully shifted to 'optics.'"

Others have been, shall we say, far less diplomatic than that, aiming swear-word-laden posts at the company, scattered with the obligatory 'Microslop' digs (which are very much in fashion, of course, among the Windows 11 cynics out there).

Here's a more restrained example of one of those comments: "They can rebrand their slop tools all they want, but I already switched to Cachy OS a year ago." (Cachy OS is a nippy Linux distro, in case you were wondering).

If Microsoft's idea of stripping out AI from Windows 11 involves simply leaving the actual tools in place and just renaming them away from Copilot, that's clearly not going to be well-received. We don't know if this is the company's plan yet, but what's happened here suggests that AI removal will involve some features being ditched completely (as in Snipping Tool) and some rebranding (as with Notepad).

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The suggestion that the anti-AI folks are already catching on to, then, is that the campaign to tone down Copilot in Windows 11 could be much more literal than we thought (dropping just the Copilot name and icon in some cases), and therefore that Microsoft isn't fully serious about this task. Hence, the comments about this being more of a marketing exercise for Microsoft than anything else.

While I concede that the decision with Notepad here looks somewhat ominous, I'm not about to fly to the conclusion that this is going to be just a PR campaign by Microsoft. After all, this Notepad tweak is still in testing, and there may yet be further changes to come.

While it seems unlikely that a wholesale removal of AI from Notepad is in the cards, given what's happened here, we can't rule it out just yet. Or, indeed, maybe Microsoft will switch things around and have the AI off by default. That'd mean the new writing tools icon wouldn't be in the top menu bar at all, unless you went hunting for the AI features in settings and enabled them.

For now, you can still disable the AI features in Notepad – whether they're called Copilot or writing tools – and that remains the option to exercise should you never use them (or outright hate AI).

However, let's face it: AI haters won't be happy until this feature is completely stripped out of Notepad (which is what many were expecting to happen). The same is true for the more diehard users of Notepad who want the text editor to be more like the streamlined effort that it was back in the day, before Microsoft started bulking (read bloating) it up with more features. All these bits of functionality sit in the background and cumulatively add up to be potential drag factors on performance and overall responsiveness, or that's certainly the concern.

➡️ Read our full guide to the best laptops

1. Best overall: Apple Mac Book Air 13-inch M4
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for Tech Radar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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• Microsoft has begun stripping out AI from Windows 11 — but it's already being criticized for not going far enough