How I took on Microsoft’s AI – and won

‘This is an assault!’ I screamed in my study, oblivious to the fact that my husband had a guest downstairs. ‘I’ll never write anything again!’

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Thanks to one more helpful word processing ‘update’–which my cousin calls ‘setbacks’– whenever I hazarded a sentence, I suddenly had bossy company: Microsoft 365’s underhandedly money-making ‘Copilot’, when I’ve always written flying solo. (‘Describe what you’d like to write, including notes or an outline, and Copilot can write a draft to help you get started,’ it insists. There’s lots of autofill; the editor button actually gives your text a score on ‘inclusiveness’, when I need a score on antisocial hostility.) With pauses for more screaming, I repeatedly attempted to murder my new little friend, even more irksome than its predecessor, Word’s obnoxious animated paperclip (‘I see that you’re writing a recipe!’). Searches soon demonstrated that, in battling to write without help from our algorithmic betters, I’d plenty of company.

I resorted to a Microsoft Community bot, bashing out that ‘If I don’t rid myself of the dratted thing, I’m going to kill myself.’ The bot immediately generated how to contact the Samaritans, over and over, and refused to answer any more questions.

At last, I beseeched Copilot itself, which was surprisingly obliging given my ingratitude for its humble services. It seems that Microsoft had originally made it even harder to decapitate the literary know-it-all. Pressured by irate users, our overlords had generated Word version 16.93, which better facilitates AI-icide, following the version that was ruining my life. So after more updating and rebooting, I was rewarded with a Copilot icon in the bowels of the program.