8 ms·
Clippy was a laughing stock and target of derisive comedy for years. It has such bad brand recognition that nobody should be surprised that they aren’t using it
by snoman 1y ago
Clippy was a laughing stock and target of derisive comedy for years. It has such bad brand recognition that nobody should be surprised that they aren’t using it.
- Nevermark 1y agoI think that is what makes it a humor goldmine. Clippy was useless. But attaching a Clippy to a language model? Still nominally useless, but mindfully so! It would be self-deprecating (un-deprecated???) humor for Microsoft, which would take the edge off of the often pushy and tone-deaf corporate look they continually and crassly paint themselves into by default. And actually potentially useful as a branding touchstone: a visual and interface link across otherwise seemingly disparate model interfaces. Clearly delineating and bridging MS AI tools from all the other mixes of tools we are accumulating. They could lean into the “clip” in Clippy with a side app for saving and organizing clippings and logs of notable interactions with any MS model, akin to a notes app. With features for compressing convos into compact topic cheat sheets (with retained sources & convos), lists and other helpful info gathering and leveraging tasks. An ongoing accumulated compressed common core of context for both (hu)man and machine, er … Clippy.
- dullcrisp 1y agoBut pushy and tone-deaf is what they are. Unless they change their whole corporate structure for this, it’d be equally tone-deaf for someone from their marketing department to pretend that Microsoft is hip and self-aware now. Better to be honest.
- Nevermark 1y agoI get the strange feeling you wouldn’t be happy with “New Clippy’s” occasional off topic purchase recommendations!
- stray 1y agoI sneak Clippy into most of the presentations I give.
- bcoates 1y agoClippy's popups were useless, but his chat interface actually worked fine (within the domian of MS office questions) things like "how do I add page numbers" or "count the paragraphs in my document") The pre-clippy natural language help in MS word worked fine too. Chatbot interfaces that work fine are nothing new, it's just very few programs are complex and open-ended enough for them to be a reasonable UI -- but a full-featured word processor probably is
- eru 1y ago> I think that is what makes it a humor goldmine. Agreed! Compare https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
- richardw 1y agoDo it on April 1. With a “we told you so” tagline. Have a few 2025/6 templates, like writing a presidential executive order because there are so many of them.
- nashashmi 1y agoAnd wait for the reactions. If it’s great, announce it as not-a-joke.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoIt was, but as someone without a dog in the hunt, I loved that ol' Clipmeister. Especially the old 'suicide note' joke image... guess would be called a meme today.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoMicrosoft Bob would be even funnier, you know it.
- hosh 1y agoI remember Clippy, but I don't remember why it was annoying. I am thinking that Robert Brooke's 3 laws of robotics applies here. (He had written one for AI but I think his thoughts on robotics are more relavent to AI agents).
- hnfong 1y agoIt tends to randomly barge into your UI when you thought you dismissed/disabled it. And never provides any useful information or suggestions.
- acutesoftware 1y agoI think it was the modal dialog box that forced you to stop what you were doing and click 'piss off clippy', rather than being able to ignore it.
- trinix912 1y agoAdditionally, there was an option that was on by default to use Clippy in place of confirmation dialogs. You'd try to close an unsaved file and instead of the usual Windows dialog you'd get Clippy asking whether you'd like to save changes instead.
- hosh 1y agoSo going by https://rodneybrooks.com/rodney-brooks-three-laws-of-robotics/ https://rodneybrooks.com/rodney-brooks-three-laws-of-robotic... That would be violating the second design principle: "When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times." With a physical robot, if it fails and freezes, it turns into a hazard. With Clippy, it intrusively stops humans from being able to do what they are doing.
- 8note 1y agoclippy was also quite helpful though, as a kid with no idea what stuff i could do with Word. its just that it outlived its welcome quickly, once i learned everything that i needed. the lesson to learn is i think about how to move from that guided experience into more power tools
- apwell23 1y agowhat about Links the cat. I used to love it.
- muzani 1y agoI think it was not funny to people trying to get work done. But that generation is retired now. The current generation is the one that were typing essays in Word and were too early to steal MP3s, so they had to use Clippy as the distraction.
- nashashmi 1y agoIt should at least have been an April fools joke. “Microsoft renames copilot for MS word as Clippy’s Pilot”
- tiborsaas 1y agoWhile true, it turned into a cultural phenomena, a close inspiration even showed up in Cyberpunk 2077 as an AI gun. So if MS would have revitalized it, it could have been done in a self ironic way to show some personality and taste and not be a cold, calculated money machine.
- MonkeyClub 1y ago> in a self ironic way to show some personality and taste and not be a cold, calculated money machine. You posted that, and someone at Microsoft unwittingly twitched.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoOr Badgey from Lower Decks https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Badgey https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Badgey
- wpm 1y agoComic Sans was a laughing stock and a target of derisive comedy, but now it can be used ironically, or in the case of Comic Mono, very straight faced as well.
- cmdrriker 1y agoFriends don't let friends use comic sans, papyrus or it's imitators IMHO.