It would be foolish to say that this is the final, incontrovertible proof that AI hype has gone too far. After all, just a week ago Microsoft's head of AI was clearly getting high on his own supply when he said that he just didn't get why folks don't like the idea of turning Windows into an "agentic" operating system. But Microsoft is now exhibiting 420BLAZEIT levels of AI hysteria by imagining that the logo for Copilot, a Windows 11 feature that nobody cares about or indeed likes, belongs on its 2025 ugly Christmas sweater.
This year's sweater, dubbed "Artifact," follows the fuzzy XP hills, iconic Windows 3.0 logo, and successive sweaters featuring MS Paint, Minesweeper and Clippy. This year, Clippy returns as a prominent sweater feature, but he's joined by a hodgepodge of other Windows-related logos that frankly scream "lazy clipart compilation." Which might actually be a perfect aesthetic for a nostalgic ugly Christmas sweater, what with the pixel art icons for MS-DOS, Paint, MSN and Internet Explorer.
But then there's Copilot.
Every other icon on the sweater dates back to the 1990s with the odd exception of the Minecraft Creeper, which already feels out of place. But what degree of AI poisoning do you have to have to demand some poor artist render the 2025 Copilot icon in '90s Windows style, in order to awkwardly include it among things that people think of with some degree of fondness? So far, Copilot's biggest accomplishment, other than driving more people to abandon Windows 11 in favor of Linux, is making Clippy appealing by comparison.
How naive of me to think that a single thing under Microsoft's corporate eye of Sauron would be considered sacred. Not even the most innocent and frivolous of things it sells is immune from being enlisted to shore up AI hype.
On the bright side, when you're putting an AI icon next to Clippy on an ugly Christmas sweater in the hopes of accomplishing that goal, you really must be desperate. There's be a delicious sort of irony in such a goofy piece of merch foretelling the eventual bursting of the AI bubble.
Maybe there's hope for RAM prices coming back down to earth yet.
