I first ran into the Copilot integration in Notepad a couple of days ago and immediately turned it right the fuck off.
In November, Microsoft began testing an update that allowed users to rewrite or summarize text in Notepad using generative AI. Another preview update today takes it one step further, allowing you to write AI-generated text from scratch with basic instructions (the feature is called Write, to differentiate it from the earlier Rewrite).
Like Rewrite and Summarize, Write requires users to be signed into a Microsoft Account, because using it requires you to use your monthly allotment of Microsoft’s AI credits. Per this support page, users without a paid Microsoft 365 subscription get 15 credits per month. Subscribers with Personal and Family subscriptions get 60 credits per month instead.
Microsoft notes that all AI features in Notepad can be disabled in the app’s settings, and obviously, they won’t be available if you use a local account instead of a Microsoft Account.
Counterpoint:
In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “perfect text-only editor” to “ai-laden spyware/malware”
And they killed Wordpad for that.
Now I didnt use wordpad at all and was content with txt and md files.
But that is vile.
I actually did use WordPad occasionally, but it wasn’t a huge loss for me, since LibreOffice does this. LO is just too overpowered for a quick RTF edit, so I used WordPad. Besides work, I only windows for a specific usecase, not as a daily, but it was still annoying.
Problem: Not enough AI training data. Solution: Start scraping everything people type in Notepad, errors and all.
They don’t need notepad for that. They control your entire OS, and all inputs. All they need to do, is capture all inputs (which they already do and package it all nicely as Recall). They’re using notepad as just a user-facing justification for the spying they do throughout the rest of the OS.