- Microsoft’s attempt 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 away from Copilot – and that hasn’t gone down well.
Microsoft has begun the process of removing AI from Windows 11, which is initially good news for many, but the catch is that one of the first moves made here is disappointingly minor in nature.
Windows Latest noted that the Snipping Tool has had Copilot completely removed from it, and this is for 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 more complicated.
That’s because in the case of the preview version of Notepad, the only thing that has been dropped 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’s much more subtle).
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In other words, it is about dropping 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.”
Another notes: “Yeah, it feels less like removal and more like rebranding to reduce backlash.”
And another Redditor laments that: “The world is no longer about reality. It has fully shifted to ‘optics’.”
Others have been, shall we say, far less diplomatic than that, aiming profanity-laden posts at the company, interspersed with the obligatory ‘Microslop’ digs (which are of course very much in vogue among 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 CachyOS a year ago.” (CachyOS is a nippy Linux distro, 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 just renaming them away from Copilot, it’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 removing AI will involve removing some features entirely (like in the Snipping Tool) and some rebranding (like with Notepad).
The suggestion that the anti-AI people are already catching is that the campaign to tone down Copilot in Windows 11 could be much more literal than we thought (in some cases just dropping the Copilot name and icon), and therefore Microsoft is not entirely serious about this task. Therefore, the comments on this are more of a marketing exercise for Microsoft than anything else.
While I admit that the Notepad decision here looks somewhat ominous, I’m not about to conclude that this will just be a PR campaign by Microsoft. After all, this Notepad tweak is still in testing and further changes may still 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, well, maybe Microsoft will switch things around and have AI turned off by default. That would mean the new writing tool icon wouldn’t be in the top menu bar at all unless you hunted down the AI features in the settings and enabled them.
For now, you can still disable Notepad’s AI features—whether they’re called Copilot or writing tools—and that’s still the option to train if you never need to use them (or outright hate the AI).
Let’s face it though: AI haters won’t be happy until this feature is completely removed from Notepad (which is what many expected would happen). The same goes for the more dismal users of Notepad who want the text editor to be more like the streamlined effort it was back before Microsoft started stuffing (read bloated) it with more features. All of these pieces of functionality sit in the background and cumulatively add up to be potential drags on performance and overall responsiveness, or so certainly is the concern.
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