Over the weekend Jani asked me to take a look at her laptop because it was heating up quite a bit and the CPU fan was almost constantly running on high speed. So I took the laptop ran a bunch of virus scans and malware removal tools on it. Disabled a some programs that didn’t need to be running all the time (Adobe was a big one) but still the issue wasn’t solved.
After wasting about 3 hours of my life on this I remembered that she is using Windows 11 and that Copilot is enabled by default on all Win11 systems. So I went and disabled Copilot and almost immediately the CPU utilization dropped and the system stopped heating up so much. Then I disabled Copilot in all the Office tools (Word/Excel etc) and Notepad. I mean why on earth does Notepad need Copilot/AI? It is a plain text note taking software… it shouldn’t have any AI in it.
The amount of energy that is being wasted by ‘AI’ not just in data-centers but on laptops/desktops computers/phones etc is mind boggling. If it worked well it would still make some sense but it doesn’t. In fact it is almost comically bad to the point of being dangerous.
I used to update all the software on my systems almost on auto earlier but now have to look at each upgrade to see what is being added to the software. This is so I can avoid the AI crap that is getting added to all software. For example, Calibre which is one of the best software for organizing/converting e-books recently added an AI Chatbot to “Allow asking AI questions about any book in your calibre library.” This was almost universally condemned and the project forked to remove the AI related nonsense. Similarly other software have added AI to their setup without warning and it is exhausting to have to vet every single upgrade before pushing it out.
I am happy that I run Linux so I don’t have to deal with the nonsense that MS and other big companies have been pushing out in the name of AI.
– Suramya