Somewhere in storage, 35 years of my writing in Microsoft Word lies dormant on floppy disks, CDs, and other tech improvements that have made access to a career’s worth of work virtually impossible. I’ve forgiven Microsoft for this war on writers because Word was a decent, reliable product I used every day—but this year, Copilot changed everything.
The tech industry keeps selling us new products to make our lives “easier.” Microsoft, like so many companies, embraced AI, the next big thing that was going to make the writing process a no-brainer. Unfortunately, it can make the finished product brainless, as the above screenshot clearly demonstrates.
Copilot, their version of AI, isn’t just a tool for people who flunked English 1A and hate writing. It’s foisted on everyone, including those of us who’ve spent our lives improving our writing skills and making sophisticated use of language. It’s impossible to turn off, and in the process of producing a document, it constantly intrudes to tell you you’re doing it wrong and suggesting a shockingly worse alternative. Here’s another example:
And yet another:
Tech people quoted on non-AI social media (like the highly recommended Mastodon and Vivaldi) are curious about why so many users hate AI. This is why. It’s invasive and, far too often, maddeningly wrong. Add to that its toll on the environment and sheer theft of writers’ work to train their LLMs, and yes, a lot of people don’t like it. Industry executives love it because they can replace human workers with a tool that liberally spreads misinformation and pleases shareholders. The humans laid off to make tech companies more profitable are posting on social media searching for work.
HEPI, a think tank in the UK, recently released a study about student use of AI. They wrote, “In 2025, we find that the student use of AI has surged in the last year, with almost all students (92%) now using AI in some form, up from 66% in 2024, and some 88% having used GenAI for assessments, up from 53% in 2024.” These are the same products known to invent legal cases and academic studies to support a point, and make idiotic corrections in grammar and spelling.
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What could the unemployed of tech world do to get us out of this mess? Is it possible to set up an alliance of nonprofit companies to create products that don’t use AI? The market share of users who don’t want AI and find data mining repugnant is out there, already opting for alternatives.
There are easier business options than wrangling with Microsoft, like offering services that don’t make their fortunes from data mining. Companies that manage your schedules, book ticket sales, provide online meetings, or offer similar functions could go very far with the marketing promise that “We don’t sell your data.”
Here’s another possibility: create in-person stores you can go to with your floppy disks or corrupted flash drives and leave with something useful, if that’s possible, or get repairs. As Big Tech shoots itself—and civilization—in the foot, we need to think outside the box. ⚝──⭒─⭑─⭒──⚝
The good news is that the new pope, Leo XIV, is also campaigning for control of AI. As reported on PBS, “Leo, the first American pope… identified AI as one of the main issues facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to defending human dignity, justice and labor.”
To that I’d add challenges to truth, accuracy, honesty, academic validity, the environment, theft, and the concept of what constitutes an educated person.
Amen.
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The self-imposed rule of the Proust Said That blog requires a Proust quote relevant to whatever I have chosen to write about. It’s why I don’t post more often. Finding the right quote in the thousands of pages of Proust’s work takes longer than writing the blog post. But here it is:
But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it,
and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
Proust Said That © 