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Microsoft is trying to transform Windows into an agentic OS. Apparently, this means Injecting copilot into the operating system to the point where you can just ask it how to do something and it tells you exactly how to do it. Just follow its instructions, no need to know anything yourself.
I guess the argument is that it will make Windows easier to use for non-technical people. Of course, there is a multitude of problems with this:
The culture war angle:
The left absolutely hates AI. It is built by multi-billionaires looking to replace our jobs so they don't have to pay us and can take all the planet's resources for themselves. Every time AI is added to consumer products, the consumer is increasingly placed in the control of its owner. AI is known to be biased, and we have already seen the tech giants attempt to inject their own bias into them. So not only are we seeing a development in the wrong direction, we are becoming increasingly vulnerable to lies and manipulation by the most powerful in society. This is without even going into the monumental costs of training the models, and the opportunity cost from not spending the resources on other areas that would be more directly helpful to humans.
The AI doomers are afraid of AI takeover. This seems like a step towards that. A chief argument against the AI doomer scenarios has been something like "who would be dumb enough to place AI in control of key systems?" Well, Windows, apparently. While it is true that in their add, it is still the user making the final decision as to which settings to choose, it seems to me that a super-intelligent AI would be capable of manipulating most users into choosing exactly the settings best suited for the AI to manipulate them further. Besides, if this becomes a commercial success, then more is sure to follow. At least, you would expect Google and Apple to follow up, making all the mainstream OS's infected with the kind of intelligence that could ultimately destroy us.
The AI skeptics believe that AI is not going to improve much in the near future. As such, this is a misstep of moronic proportions. You even see it in the add: The user asks the AI to increase his font size. It suggests he changes the scale setting, which is currently at 150%. When asked what percentage he should change it to, the AI responds with 150%, as this is the recommended setting. The result? Nothing changes, because the setting is kept at default. Wait no, the user went against the AI's wishes and picked 200%, seemingly hoping that you would not spot this stupid mishap. If the actual marketing material is damaged by AI hallucination, how bad is the final product going to be? Are you going to have to argue with your AI until it finally does what you want? This is probably going to push more power users over to Linux, as the agent does not give them the fine control over their systems that they want. Meanwhile, it might actually make the experience worse for Grandma, who is gaslit into picking suboptimal settings for herself by an unhelpful machine.
Finally, if you are concerned about AI and mental health, you have probably heard of AI-induced psychosis. The usage of chatbots by a small minority of vulnerable people has apparently fed into their delusions, resulting in psychosis-related behavior. An agentic OS that at best requires the user to opt out of AI functionality, places the chatbot right in the user's face. While a therapist today could instruct her patients to avoid seeking out the chatbots, that is hardly possible when the main way to use your operating system is through an LLM. If copilot is on by default, or if other ways to use the system is slowly deprecated making it harder to use without the bot, I would expect this change to result in more cases of diagnosable mental health conditions.
This is fascinating to me in light of the fact that the left often accuses AI of innate bias. Okay, but are they aware of the direction the bias goes? Ask AI why women are bad drivers and it will wag its finger at you for daring to ask that. Ask AI why men are bad drivers and it will laugh along with you before gently pointing out the cause of the misconception. Similar dynamics exist along racial lines. This is true of basically every AI except for Grok (obviously). AIs are gigawoke and yet the woke often express their extreme hatred of the people responsible.
It's enough to make you wonder if the billionaire techbros really are stupid, because their efforts to appease the most enthusiastic billionaire haters seem to have not affected them in the slightest. Why do they continue to do it? It's just the latest round of "Why do rich people assume kinship with the people who want to cut off their heads," but it's a rather naked example. The billionaire techbros have absolutely no favor with the types of people who want their AIs to be implicit-biased trained. Their efforts to make implicit-bias-trained AIs do not move the needle on those people's opinions of them, nor AI, as they see AI as a fundamental evil that is taking artists' jobs. So why the fuck are they forfeiting their own integrity to appease them?
I'm not even sure that the left specifically hates AI, or if they're not just part of the general case, which is that everyone hates AI. People who like AI, in my experience, are a small, extremely non-representative sample of tech-obsessed weirdos, and even they get roundly jeered at by other tech-obsessed weirdos.
There are specifically left-coded critiques of AI, but likewise for right-coded critiques. I think the technology is just widely hated in general. Per Ipsos, Americans' views on AI do not appear to split by political tribe. It may change in the future, since AI optimism skews towards the young, the wealthy, and as per Stanford's HAI, the educated, which are all more left-leaning demographics. I'd cautiously predict that if AI hate becomes partisan coded, it will be coded more as right-wing or Republican.
Is that why ChatGPT has been the most downloaded app worldwide for almost every month of 2025?
Well, the word 'everyone' was obviously hyperbole, but as I think my links showed, dislike of AI appears to be widespread and more popular than support for it. Many people have tried out LLMs, but that by itself doesn't tell us how much it is genuinely liked.
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