Two things happened this week that caught my attention:

• DeepSeek (to be fair, this caught everyone’s attention).
• Microsoft decided to jam Copilot into their 365 Subscriptions and charge more.

DeepSeek is, without saying, the BIG news right now. I don’t have much to say other than I’m really enjoying watching OpenAI and it’s ilk get absolutely pantsed.

For more info and a more eloquent rant, Ed Zitron has a great take on DeepSpeek and AI.

I will say that all of this hit home more when I logged into Outlook webmail today and saw this:

Can I turn off that gaudy Copilot button? Sure? Maybe? While trying to figure out how, I also found out that MS was going to increase our yearly subscription fee by quite a bit seemingly just for the privilege of having access to Copilot. After more digging, I found that we could switch our MS365 account to something they have branded “Classic” which is, you know, just MS365 without fucking Copilot and costs the same I’m paying now.

To do this you have to begin the process of cancelling your subscription and then choose Classic while you’re on the “boo-hoo, please don’t leave” screen. It’s a bit of a dark pattern, but at least you can forgo paying for Copilot. However, since I’m in the middle of my subscription period, I’m stuck with Copilot until the fall.

Of course, MS sent me an email regarding our account change:

You can see that, just below the subject, Copilot wanted to summarize this email. Since the family is stuck with this shit until the middle of September, let’s see what it does. Fuck it. Show me the magic! Improve my life!

I clicked on Summary and this is what I got:

I knew it was going to do exactly this, yet I was still irrationally angry. It took ten seconds or so for Microsoft’s AI to read my email and give me that summary. In that time I could have oh, I don’t know, just read the fucking email.

Microsoft Copilot is the literal equivalent of Dethklok recording on water; destroying millions of acres of natural habitat and blacking out cities so Nathan can record himself blowing a raspberry and clapping his hands.

I can think of any number of problems in this world that need to be solved before I think, “Hey, I could really use a summary of an email!” Yet this is the exact shit all of these huge companies are trying to sell us. Google, Apple, Meta, all of them. They’re not in this to make your life easier. They’re in it to make money. They’re in it for power. They’re in it to say, “We’re number one!”

Don’t ever let their marketing tell you otherwise.