Microsoft Considers Scaling Back on Consumer-Facing AI

Microsoft's aggressive and controversial AI products may soon be reigned in to be less obnoxious, or potentially gone away with entirely in some cases. That's according to unnamed sources who spoke to Windows Central.

For the last several years, Microsoft has been aggressively forcing AI into literally almost everything they can. This has prompted immense backlash from users for a variety of reasons, including "what possible use could AI have in this product?" to "this is a literal dystopian nightmare, who greenlit this?" At some points the backlash has been so bad that Microsoft has been forced to delay products to rework them (like Recall) but still eventually forced them on users.

Now it seems that Microsoft may finally be listening to users for a change.

Maybe.

Windows Central is light on details, but it seems that Microsoft is completely rethinking basically every AI product they're currently integrating into Windows. It's unclear which products - if any - Microsoft intends to completely roll back, but the wording of the article suggests that it's not off the table with at least some of them. At very least, Microsoft seems intent on reworking the products to make them a smoother experience and more useful. For example, Microsoft is currently "reviewing" the Copilot integrations in Notepad and Paint and may remove them entirely, while Recall is expected to "evolve" rather than be entirely discarded.

At this point, any pulling back of the AI features in Windows would be welcome, though it would be preferrable to have them be entirely optional in the first place.