If you were already skeptical — if not livid — about Microsoft’s ongoing campaign to drown Windows 11 with useless AI features, you’re really going to hate this video.
In a 30 second clip uploaded over the weekend, programmer Ryan Fleury demonstrates how even using Window 11’s purportedly AI-powered search bar to do exactly what it tells you to do doesn’t come close to working as advertised.
At the start of the video, the settings page search bar, with its gleaming AI icon, recommends searching “My mouse pointer is too small.” This goes against the common search function wisdom that you should look up using keywords, not entire sentences, but whatever: AI magic can take care of that for you, right?
But as it turns out, when Fleury searches “My mouse pointer is too small,” as exactly phrased by the search suggestion, nothing turns up. He waits around ten seconds with no luck, either. But when he looks up “test” afterwards, he gets three results.
“This is not a real company,” Fleury fumed.
He was joined by dozens of netizens who jeered the misfiring feature using a tough-but-fair new pejorative: “Microslop.”
Whether you like it or not, Microsoft isn’t backing off from basting Windows 11 with AI features. It’s ended support for its old operating system, Windows 10, in the hopes that you’ll upgrade and try out its Copilot-integrated successor, its AI chatbot slash virtual assistant.
The AI transformation is intended to be so sweeping that various executives have described the pivot in terms such as turning Windows 11 into an “agentic OS,” or better yet, into a “canvas for AI.” Some of the changes include putting an icon for Copilot in the middle of your taskbar and integrating Copilot into Windows Explorer, allowing you to right-click generate summaries of documents. Other features in the works include Copilot Vision, which lets the AI analyze whatever appears on the desktop display, and Copilot Actions, which lets the AI perform tasks on your behalf.
Many users fear that the deeply woven AI integrations pose a security risk, a fear that is informed by past Windows 11 AI blunders including when earlier versions of its AI “Recall” feature, which creates a history of your computer activity by taking constant screenshots of it, was caught saving sensitive data like Social Security numbers, and storing the screenshots in an unprotected folder.
The backlash against Microsoft’s AI pivot has quickly mounted ever since it announced it’d be ending support for Windows 10, but as anti-AI sentiment at large also heightens, the outrage has recently reached a boiling point with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s recent plea that we should stop using the word “slop,” the new slang for describing low quality text, images, and videos mass produced by AI models. Unfortunately for Nadella, he unwittingly precipitated a classic case of the Streisand effect, and soon after his “slop” comments, the term “Microslop” suddenly went viral online.
“‘AI writes 90% of our code!!!!,’” Fleury mocked, referring to boasts made by Nadella and other tech CEOs. “Don’t worry, we can tell.”
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