https://thejaymo.net/2025/08/12/clippy-a-history/ Jay Springett lives here on the Internet Fri, 17 Oct 2025 15:46:18 +0000 hourly 1 https://thejaymo.net/2025/08/12/clippy-a-history/#comment-100622 Fri, 17 Oct 2025 15:46:18 +0000 https://thejaymo.net/?p=72447#comment-100622 […] In the last instalment of my ‘Little Guys’ series, we saw Clippy banished from our desktops for …. Around that same time, however, a far more radical question was emerging: what if the ‘little guy’ could escape the screen entirely? […]

]]> https://thejaymo.net/2025/08/12/clippy-a-history/#comment-100361 Mon, 18 Aug 2025 19:07:16 +0000 https://thejaymo.net/?p=72447#comment-100361 […] It was specially strange to be mentally juxtaposing peoples public feelings toward 4o last week whilst writing about Clippy! […]

]]> https://thejaymo.net/2025/08/12/clippy-a-history/#comment-100345 Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:46:41 +0000 https://thejaymo.net/?p=72447#comment-100345 […] A History of Clippy: Jay Springett’s occasional history of ‘weird little digital companions’ continues with a look at the genesis,life and eventual death of Clippy, everyone’s favourite terrible digital assistant which is now in the process of being resurrected for the post-AI age. I thought this was super-interesting, in part just as a history of product design and implementation but also in terms of how the next, inevitable wave of these sorts of things is going to end up looking and feeling and working, and includes some smart ways of thinking about/framing design and thinking around how they function and how we interact with them: “In my work recently, I’ve been dividing ‘little guys’ into kinds of digital agents by where they live: the inhabitant and the interloper. A Petz cat is an example of a pure inhabitant. It exists inside a self-contained environment or world. The user is an external force, interacting with it. Clippy, on the other hand, is an interloper. He doesn’t ‘live inside’ the Word document. But he also doesn’t fully live inside Microsoft Word’s interface either. He’s a sort of meta-entity. Not fully part of the world/document he was observing, nor the softwares ‘frame’. The direct descendants of Clippy are today’s copilots and other kinds of embedded assistants. But some are more ‘in the world’ than others. The other question that arises after ‘taxonomising’ Agents between interlopers and inhabitants is “Does the agent act on its own? or does it wait to be called?” I’ve been thinking of this axis as Proactive vs. Reactive.” […]

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