Windows Now Has AI-Powered Copy and Paste 59
Umar Shakir reports via The Verge: Microsoft is adding a new Advanced Paste feature to PowerToys for Windows 11 that can convert your clipboard content on the fly with the power of AI. The new feature can help people speed up their workflows by doing things like copying code in one language and pasting it in another, although its best tricks require OpenAI API credits.
Advanced Paste is included in PowerToys version 0.81 and, once enabled, can be activated with a special key command: Windows Key + Shift + V. That opens an Advanced Paste text window that offers paste conversion options including plaintext, markdown, and JSON. If you enable Paste with AI in the Advanced Paste settings, you'll also see an OpenAI prompt where you can enter the conversion you want -- summarized text, translations, generated code, a rewrite from casual to professional style, Yoda syntax, or whatever you can think to ask for.
Advanced Paste is included in PowerToys version 0.81 and, once enabled, can be activated with a special key command: Windows Key + Shift + V. That opens an Advanced Paste text window that offers paste conversion options including plaintext, markdown, and JSON. If you enable Paste with AI in the Advanced Paste settings, you'll also see an OpenAI prompt where you can enter the conversion you want -- summarized text, translations, generated code, a rewrite from casual to professional style, Yoda syntax, or whatever you can think to ask for.
Somebody is harvesting training data (Score:5, Insightful)
Hence expect this to be completely unusable as soon as it is commercial code you are copying in any way. You certainly do not own anything here.
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I expect this to generate a lot of really crappy, insecure code.
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And that too.
Re: Somebody is harvesting training data (Score:3)
Nothing new here, Microsoft has already borked the csv format, it depends on your localization.
Even more fun would be if this happens with accounting software where you have to keep track of the local legislation and conventions.
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They made CSV dependent on locale? Seriously? The mind boggles....
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Locale fucking with code is decades old thing. For example, differences in how decimal point is expressed. Time. Etc.
AppLocale is a decades old piece of software for a reason.
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CSV is not code.
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It's intended to be processable data, but if you have the wrong locale then you can't open it in Excel.
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No, it's a data format. But data is obviously going to be fucked with if you have wrong locale. Because locales have different formats of displaying the same data.
But not only does that fuck with data. It even fucks with code. That was my point.
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Indeed. Also: Remember when MS translated VB keywords? That is on a whole new level of fucked up.
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I remember coding back in 1990s and 2000s and getting hilarious syntax errors because I kept forgetting that decimal descriptor is a comma here and a dot in US where a lot of coding practices and languages are established.
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Create some data in Excel with US locale, save it in CSV format, then change to Swedish locale and then open the CSV file and the fun begins.
Re: Somebody is harvesting training data (Score:1)
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Yes, that's right. But it doesn't really make sense to have that change in the CSV files because it causes a lot of data portability issues.
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A lot of things MS does make no sense at all form an IT or CS perspective. They do it for marketing or other deranged reasons and screw whoever has problems as a result. It is not like people could simply move to a better product.
Re: Somebody is harvesting training data (Score:2)
And how many new bugs will we find in programs now?
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No new ones. AI cannot make new things. We will get proven, known bugs from other languages instead! Such a great win for everybody!
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Considering what I have seen from AI generated content (fiction texts and images) I'd expect some really strange bugs.
How many extra limbs do you want with your coffee today?
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Indeed. And what this will also do is that the defenders will be put at a disadvantage because many of these will not be in the usual human patterns and hence harder to find.
What happened to open source mindset? (Score:2)
The whole idea of open source, is that we hang it all out there for everybody to use, for free. As a frequent user, and occasional contributor to open source software, I don't mind my code or prose being "harvested" (shared) in this way.
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FOSS code? Not an issue. Most of that has probably been used for training data already. But this is cut & paste and a lot more general than just code.
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So to use the AI part you have to supply it with your own OpenAI API key, and it uses your credits. So anyone using it will be fully aware what it is doing, because it's just a shortcut to pasting it into the website and copying the response.
There is some useful local-only functionality for developers. It can convert formatted text and XML to JSON, and convert formatted text to Markdown. I hate Markdown but a lot of stuff uses it. I bet it screws up all your tabs.
Copy Windows (Score:5, Funny)
Paste as Linux
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Paste as Linux
Or Paste as TECO [wikipedia.org]
It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse - introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.
How many more intrusions (Score:2)
How many more intrusions is M/S adding to Windows, AI Copy/Paste ? Nice way for people to get passwords and other confidential information if they want it.
Glad I left that ecosystem decades ago.
Re:How many more intrusions (Score:4, Informative)
Did you even read the summary? It is part of PowerToys... a package of supplemental Windows tools, NOT part of Windows
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Yet. It's not part of Windows, yet. Microsoft has already borked the right-click menu in Windows 11. Imagine how much more mayhem they can produce when they incorporate this into every Windows install.
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They had that since early pre-release windows 10. That's when keylogger became a default feature of windows "telemetry".
This reminds me of when they integrated File... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This reminds me of when they integrated File... (Score:4, Interesting)
It was less about "the internet" and more about making everything a webpage
Re: This reminds me of when they integrated File.. (Score:2)
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Someone pasted a sharepoint link into chat during a meeting yesterday, and it must have been 500 characters long. Sharepoint is a write-only system. The search is awful, and it's impossible to navigate by modifying the URLs, which is sometimes a shortcut for navigating other poorly-designed web-based systems.
Re: This reminds me of when they integrated File.. (Score:2)
It's been like that since windows 98 way to pay attention
Wow! (Score:3)
That sure sounds like yet another Windows feature that nobody ever even remotely asked for! Bravo Microsoft!
as if Microsoft could get a paste operation right (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd settle for Microsoft providing a paste that doesn't blow the formatting of the entire rest of the document.
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You mean like clicking Ctrl+Alt+V to paste instead of Ctrl+V?
You're welcome.
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Yes, it is important to remember asinine key combination so your document does not get weirded out.
MS AIBot Here: to paste and preserve formatting, please stand on your head and jump up and down while pasting. Is there anything else I can help you with? I'd really like to, y'know.
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Yes, it is important to remember asinine key combination
It's really not. You also have the option of two different paste buttons on the top, two paste buttons on the right click context menu, and two paste options in the menu if remembering a shortcut key is too complex for you.
Coming soon (Score:5, Funny)
An operating system (Score:1)
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What operating system does all *that*??? I certainly can't think of one.
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i dont think linux posses any of those qualities though
- easily configured... if you like fucking around with a terminal like its still 1940
- easy to use.... see above
- support my hardware well.... i recall years of whining over nvidia drivers? though in every other space (embedded, server), I'll concede this one
- run any program i like.... as long as you dont want to play games, sure
- have robust and comprehensive I/O underpinnings.... not enough experience here
- be secure.... a much lauded quality of nix
Will it add sass and exasperation to your text? (Score:2)
Watched one of those chat gpt 4 ads on the internets the other day. By the time the dude asked it to count the third time, it was sounding like it wanted to punch him in the face if it had arms.
Kinda defeats the point of seamless AI to make you more productive if your attention is diverted by extraneous emotional content in the output.
Just imagine some poor sap copypasting his code into this thing and it giving him an earful about how his code sucks, his comments are unreadable, and what kind of h1b or outs
Re: Will it add sass and exasperation to your text (Score:2)
Yea I went to my lab computer saw an open browser not noticing it was edge from one of the techs and searched for "clearance hole for 8-32"
The first result from Bing had the right awnwer in the summary .. meanwhile their Ai thing wrote a 2 page conversation telling me how the correct hole size was important and blah blah blah then proceeded to give me the tap drill diameters which isn't what I asked for
The next day, I did it again just for giggles and it got it right ... just in every measurement possible
Paste from spreadsheet to SQL WHERE clause (Score:2)
Goodbye RedGate, you were good once upon a time.
How about fixing that FUBAR copy/paste function? (Score:3)
It would actually be easy. Just copy/paste honoring the formatting of the TARGET. Have you ever tried copy/pasting something into a Teams chat? Or an Outlook mail? 9 out of 10 times what you WANT is to get the content formatted in the way the text is formatted in the chat or mail.
What you GET though is that it pastes everything retaining the format of the source.
And yes. I know that I could right click, paste text only... but why is that not the STANDARD behaviour?
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Ctrl+Shift+V in teams. You're welcome.
but why is that not the STANDARD behaviour?
Presumably because you're not running the latest beta branch of Office (they changed the standard behaviour recently).
This is a copy and paste from Clipboard AI (Score:1)
The other way around, please! (Score:2)
Let the clipboard be the good ol' one.
And put some more intelligence anywhere else.
So that explains it... (Score:1)
Screw off with AI (Score:3)
Not copy and paste then (Score:2)
I would expect copy to you know, copy something exactly, and paste to paste it exactly as it was copied. Anything else is missing the point of the feature to be honest.
Win+V (Score:1)