Recall/Copilot AI on Windows is a good feature, stop fear-mongering

[Dom]

We've seen people saying that Recall (and Copilot) is the reason that they would move away from Windows 11 and I honestly do not understand this line of logic.

If you don't know, Recall is an AI feature which takes snapshots of the PC screen every 3 seconds in order to remember what the user did on the PC, and utilize that information to personalize and predict the experience.

Recall is an additional feature of Windows 11 that can be fully or temporarily disabled at any time, just like other features of the operating system. There will be a button at the taskbar that temporarily disables the Recall feature. This way, if the user is doing something confidential on the computer such as "scientific" research, they can just press that and no snapshots will be taken for a certain time period. Or, they can disable the entire feature from the settings.

The snapshots will be encrypted and stored locally on the hard drive. The encryption key is stored (locally) on the TPM. Due to existing privacy laws, Microsoft is not even allowed to send such snapshots over to their servers. It would be a major breach.

Some conspiracy theories have sparked that Microsoft will force Recall to be enabled all the time, and I honestly don't understand where those claims come from. Recall (and Copilot) is very resource-intensive and requires very high-end hardware. It would be extremely inconvenient from Microsoft to require it to be enabled all the time and it would provide no value to them to do so. It is obviously the best-case practice to have it enabled whenever the user wants it and would benefit from its use.

Personally, I can see this feature being extremely useful. When I'm using the computer and discovering things, sometimes I do wish I could rewind what I witnessed. I may have seen something that I thought was not important at the time, and later on change my mind and want to come back to it. In fact, that sounds fantastic. There have been few times when I've lost Office files (such as due to file corruption). With tools such as Recall, the AI could re-create the entire file based on what it has seen in the past and so on.

The question I have for people who would move to Linux over tools such as Recall is, would they also ditch their Linux operating system if it starts to have AI tools (like Recall) as well? Fact is, AI increases productivity and usability. Everyone in big tech knows this, and that's why they are integrating AI into everything they do. Operating systems and web services that don't have AI will simply fall behind in progress and therefore they would not enable the same level of productivity for the user.

Moving away from operating systems that utilize AI to get the best out of the user experience would be a degrade, not an upgrade. If not right now, few years from now, for sure.

[Dom]

Originally posted by KalCuey:

Originally posted by Dom:

Linux is open-source but there are big companies that work on major distributions. Taking Canonical as the most obvious example, although there are others too.

I don't think it's out of the question that they would add AI tools into their operating system once AI competition within the OS field gets more and more intense. It's true that someone could create a version (fork) that has them removed and there will always be Linux distributions that don't have AI. So don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to escape AI.

And that's not really the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that AI is going to make the use of the operating system and the services better. That's why there are so many investments and all of the hype. And the industry is constantly discovering new capabilities and potential. The people who don't have that advanced AI integrated into their system, will have an obsolete system in the future that does not perform as well as those that have it.

So Copilot and other AI tools that would function similarly need to be seen in a bigger light & context than just "Microsoft bad".

there are many distros available

someone will fork one without the ai for those of us that do not want that stuff

Yeah and that's a good thing. I'm not against choices. But I just disagree with the idea of escaping AI, especially when it is a very useful tool and its capabilities are only expanding. That's just my opinion though.

[Dom]

Originally posted by m662:

Originally posted by Dom:

Linux is open-source but there are big companies that work on major distributions. Taking Canonical as the most obvious example, although there are others too.

I don't think it's out of the question that they would add AI tools into their operating system once AI competition within the OS field gets more and more intense. It's true that someone could create a version (fork) that has them removed and there will always be Linux distributions that don't have AI. So don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to escape AI.

And that's not really the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that AI is going to make the use of the operating system and the services better. That's why there are so many investments and all of the hype. And the industry is constantly discovering new capabilities and potential. The people who don't have that advanced AI integrated into their system, will have an obsolete system in the future that does not perform as well as those that have it.

So Copilot and other AI tools that would function similarly need to be seen in a bigger light & context than just "Microsoft bad".

As someone who uses Linux in corporate we suspect field test with A.I in management dashboard starting around halfway 2025. Integration at the moment is mostly web development related but we suspect automation of log anomalies and performance optimization reports to be tested and at a much later state possible integration with security suites.

I expect we start field test with replacing basic HTML, CSS development for us to start at around 2025. We have in house capability to train A.I models and build applications to do integrations ourselves been doing it for quiet some time. So next on the chopping block are going to be regular developers followed by designers once we get A.I that understand customer taste.

Once the onboard A.I NPU hardware becomes the norm we will probably see the shift towards regular data-centers offering it as packages and system administration getting slowly replaced.. That is what Microsoft is aiming for with the co-pilot laptop consumer tests. Taking results to later integrate in Azure. It will drive the competition to do something similar.

Whether people are going to like it the industry decided 20+ years ago already that A.I. was going to be the future however as with most things maturity takes time.

We are now in the hype, marketing phase were a lot of empty promises are being made to drive up investments. The majority of the toys are now shared with consumers but expect that to change later one as regulations hit and eventually copyright can be claimed over A.I output. Consumer products will be more chained while corporate will have based on certification more freedom.

Does not mean of course that everything is going behind lock and key because opensource will always be there but integration wise your going to be sucked into the same old situations where you have a vendor you are going to rely on if your not already tech savvy.

Thank you for your thoughtful comment that is coming from the field of expertise. Yes, people tend to think that Copilot is Microsoft soloing and going their own path in the industry but Copilot exists because of competition.

Operating system environments simply cannot escape the potential of AI if they wish to be at the top in terms of performance and efficiency. People need to understand this before they start bashing Microsoft for introducing these kinds of features. I don't think there is anything wrong with Microsoft wanting to be at the top of the competition.

There will always be people who try to escape progress and development, whatever that happens to be. I often question if that is truly in the interests of the person who is doing so. Especially when a lot of these actions are based on incorrect information. I saw videos claiming that snapshots will be sent to Microsoft servers and you cannot disable the feature. Neither of these claims are true. Then it becomes a topic of mistrust, ex. "well, I don't believe them". But people have these kinds of views for all types of things, ranging from vaccinations to various pieces of facts that are out there. It can be near impossible to convince them otherwise.

And I'm not against open-source. It's really a great thing in circumstances where desired. It's good that there's starting to be more open-source AI for use - models and so on. I'm running Meta Llama locally on my computer everyday. I can disconnect from the internet and it still can answer pretty much anything. These kinds of tools are very good for those who want to maximize privacy, so that the inputs are not sent over to any servers.

[KalGimpa]

Originally posted by Dom:

Originally posted by KalCuey:

there are many distros available

someone will fork one without the ai for those of us that do not want that stuff

Yeah and that's a good thing. I'm not against choices. But I just disagree with the idea of escaping AI, especially when it is a very useful tool and its capabilities are only expanding. That's just my opinion though.

the people that made it said that this is not what it was made for and we should not trust it

it was designed to create a good narrative, a story

no matter how much data it is fed,

it will never be able to interact like it is human because it not

it is a machine attempting to mimic what it thinks humans would say

one group taught one to lie

and now they cannot tell if it is lying when it says it isn't

anyways

i know where to play with the ai systems

i do not need one on my pc

[hypercybermegatron]

Originally posted by Dom:

We've seen people saying that Recall (and Copilot) is the reason that they would move away from Windows 11 and I honestly do not understand this line of logic.

If you don't know, Recall is an AI feature which takes snapshots of the PC screen every 3 seconds in order to remember what the user did on the PC, and utilize that information to personalize and predict the experience.

Recall is an additional feature of Windows 11 that can be fully or temporarily disabled at any time, just like other features of the operating system. There will be a button at the taskbar that temporarily disables the Recall feature. This way, if the user is doing something confidential on the computer such as "scientific" research, they can just press that and no snapshots will be taken for a certain time period. Or, they can disable the entire feature from the settings.

The snapshots will be encrypted and stored locally on the hard drive. The encryption key is stored (locally) on the TPM. Due to existing privacy laws, Microsoft is not even allowed to send such snapshots over to their servers. It would be a major breach.

Some conspiracy theories have sparked that Microsoft will force Recall to be enabled all the time, and I honestly don't understand where those claims come from. Recall (and Copilot) is very resource-intensive and requires very high-end hardware. It would be extremely inconvenient from Microsoft to require it to be enabled all the time and it would provide no value to them to do so. It is obviously the best-case practice to have it enabled whenever the user wants it and would benefit from its use.

Personally, I can see this feature being extremely useful. When I'm using the computer and discovering things, sometimes I do wish I could rewind what I witnessed. I may have seen something that I thought was not important at the time, and later on change my mind and want to come back to it. In fact, that sounds fantastic. There have been few times when I've lost Office files (such as due to file corruption). With tools such as Recall, the AI could re-create the entire file based on what it has seen in the past and so on.

The question I have for people who would move to Linux over tools such as Recall is, would they also ditch their Linux operating system if it starts to have AI tools (like Recall) as well? Fact is, AI increases productivity and usability. Everyone in big tech knows this, and that's why they are integrating AI into everything they do. Operating systems and web services that don't have AI will simply fall behind in progress and therefore they would not enable the same level of productivity for the user.

Moving away from operating systems that utilize AI to get the best out of the user experience would be a degrade, not an upgrade. If not right now, few years from now, for sure.

What about harvesting every bit of data imaginable from users for advertising? Or is Microsoft purely motivated by the desire to innovate?

[Electric Cupcake]

Windows past the point of no return years ago. I agree that disabling this "feature" and changing ownership permissions in order to wipe the system folder and actually free up space for something useful would be a minor annoyance (St. Isidore knows, I've gotten pretty good at doing that over the years), but since Windows still thinks they have the right to force updates and antifeatures on us and railroad online accounts, it's not worth the effort anymore.

[miakisfan]

I didn't want A.I. forced on me and that is exactly what happened. I don't use it although I am sure with it constantly running in the background something is going on there.

BTW my problem isn't with the A.I. ... it is not knowing the people who are programming it personally. I don't know how they are coding it or more to the point for whom they may be coding it for. There is a reason the saying *trust but verify* exists.

I saw what happened with Google Gemini and that was all I needed to know about the coders to be honest with you. If you saw that and you don't have an issue with it you *need a visit to your friendly neighborhood therapist*.

[Electric Cupcake]

Yeah, but anyone still using anything google at this late hour is a lost cause.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-starts-deprecating-older-more-capable-chrome-extensions-next-week/