Microsoft Keeps On Giving, Now Displaying A Watermark If You’re AI Deficient
Use Microsoft Copilot OR ELSE
Redmond is just cranking out the brilliant ideas, managing to come up with a new feature that beats out their ad supported Start Menu for sheer obnoxiousness. As we mentioned earlier this week, Windows 11 24H2 spells the end of any machine that doesn’t support the SSE4.2 instruction set. You will also be gifted with ads for Microsoft Store apps in your Start Menu at roughly the same time. However, our outrage was not enough to satisfy Microsoft and so they have provided another gift.
After the new update, if your CPU is not powerful enough to use Microsoft Copilot then Microsoft will let you know that by displaying a watermark on your screen. This is likely to look like the current watermark that appears on systems that are not properly licensed and will float over everything you do. Microsoft doesn’t care if you have no interest in Copilot on your desktop or in Edge, they are going to let you know your machine is too pathetic to use it anyways.
Hopefully there will be a way to suppress this after launch, one insider managed to do so by disabling a part of the OS which is not something most can do. That assumes that Microsoft won’t find a way around that before the update launches.
With Windows 11 24H2 all geared up to have AI-intensive applications, Microsoft has added a code that will warn you if your PC does not meet the hardware requirements, according to code dug up by Twitter/X sleuth Albacore.
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Yet another reason to switch the rest of my systems to Linux.
A pretty dumb take: ALL insider builds already display a watermark, which provides build information and other flags (e.g. if there is no TPM you get an “unsupported build” addition to the watermark). The sole change is that presence/absence of an AI accelerator also triggers a flag.