Wrestling with Copilot (Cecilia Peartree)

I have tried not to worry too much about AI, and even to welcome it, in its place, since one of my sons has been working with it in some capacity and I still feel it has the potential to help with scientific and medical research projects and that kind of thing.

I can't imagine that Copilot, on the other hand, will be a help with anything. 

I didn't intend to have to wrestle with Copilot, but it has recently invaded my Word documents exactly like a virus, and one for which there isn't any kind of antidote or vaccine. I think this has happened as an unintended consequence of an upgrade I've made to my Microsoft Office setup in order that I can experiment with their new-fangled tool for creating online databases. I did this because I've volunteered for years in various roles in a local community organisation, and some issues have arisen that I feel can only be resolved with a database, and of course Microsoft have used this moment to stop including Access in the Office setup.

Anyway, when I first became aware of Copilot's presence I was almost at the end of the edits for my latest novel, and I didn't have much time to spare on finding a way to turn it off, though I did take an hour or so out of my writing time to make a first attempt to get rid of it. The way Copilot manifests itself is that something appears at the top of the document asking if you want it to summarise the content, which of course I didn't want. I was slightly tempted to give it a try because I was curious about how it would whittle down my 70,000 words into a few paragraphs, if that's what it does, but I told myself sternly not to play with it until after I'd finished my book. The other thing that happens is that a weird symbol appears in the left-hand margin and follows you as you dart to and fro in the text - this is more of an issue during the edit than the initial draft, I suppose. But still, it's like one of these annoying flies that you just catch sight of for a moment and can never quite persuade to go out of the window.

I can't really see any possible use for Copilot for a novelist, and I would prefer not to have it there at all. I resolved to try and find out how to switch it off, which to date has proved impossible. Most of the places I've looked tell me to find the Copilot checkbox in the 'options' menu in the Word setup and un-tick it. I don't even have a Copilot checkbox there. My most recent attempt involved a site called 'Wikihow' which advised going to the Windows settings and switching off something that didn't even mention Copilot but said something like 'Turn on experiences that analyze your content'. I have now tried this without success, and am contemplating the instructions for updating the registry instead, though that does sound a little scary. I vaguely remember my sister-in-law saying she had turned off Copilot in her web browser, so maybe I will have to resort to asking her how she did it, though as someone with years and years of computing experience, I feel I should be able to solve this myself.

Comments on this would be very welcome! But at least spring seems to be here.