Are You Not Entertained? ⭐️

Well, it looks like Microsoft finally found a niche market for Copilot. It’s for entertainment purposes only.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Three years after it launched Copilot and kicked off this AI era, after applying the term Copilot to over 100 products and services and after investing–or just spending–hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure in a manic bid to remain relevant, Microsoft is now claiming that Copilot, the center of its strategy for the future, is … for entertainment purposes only?

Yes. But also no.

Too many reports to count have noted that the terms of service for Microsoft Copilot, which was last updated in October 2025, state that “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.” That’s, well, entertaining. But I’m more taken aback by all the warnings in this document. There are so many.

Anyway, Microsoft says it’s all a big mistake, or what we might call a hallucination, to use the AI term du jour.

“The ‘entertainment purposes’ phrasing is legacy language from when Copilot originally launched as a search companion in Bing,” a Microsoft statement explains. “As the product has evolved, that language is no longer reflective of how Copilot is used today and will be altered with our next update.”

So, that sort of explains things, though one wonders why no one inside or outside the company noticed this until now. After all, Copilot as a brand emerged just a month after that February 2023 launch, and Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot for Windows 11 soon thereafter.

The problem, of course, is that Copilot is anything but entertaining. Yes, there’s a goofy Gaming Copilot crammed into the Game Bar in Windows 11 now, but like most Copilot implementations, it doesn’t seem to have resonated with anyone, nor does it seem to work particularly well. But the big push with Copilot, so to speak, has been on the paying side, with offerings like Microsoft 365 Copilot for businesses and Copilot in various Microsoft 365 consumer plans.

To date, Copilot has basically been an embarrassment for the software giant, with incredibly few paying customers and little in the way of product satisfaction. But Microsoft has seized victory from the jaws of worse defeats than this in the past. I’ll remind everyone of a little disaster called Windows that flailed along for five years before turning into a sensation that defined personal computing for the next three decades. Anything is possible.

However, I see a bigger issue here. Microsoft’s Copilot/AI efforts have always been chaotic, with little in the way of strategy, more of a “throw it on the wall and see what sticks” approach. This, combined with the sheer amount of AI that Microsoft regurgitates into the world every month (if not week) has helped undermine our collective trust of the company and its products and services. And not just AI: If the belated focus on quality in Windows 11 is any indication, and it is, then Microsoft has a lot of work to do before it will regain that trust.

Microsoft has gotten the memo on Copilot and AI, sort of: Part of the Windows 11 quality push includes removing all the surface-level Copilot branding that was previously littered throughout the platform. And it is racing to wean itself off OpenAI’s models and capabilities through its inhouse Microsoft AI efforts to what appears to be good effect. That said, it can’t happen quickly enough: OpenAI isn’t just toxic, it’s a cancerous growth that’s infecting our entire industry. Indeed, you can easily tie Microsoft’s reckless AI rollout to OpenAI’s influence.

It astonishes me that Microsoft created–or, reused–a brand, Copilot, to push its AI efforts, though I suppose this is another example of “everyone else is doing it.” I still view AI as a feature, not a product, something that will simply be a part–an ingredient–of all its products and services. But this insanity has gripped Microsoft before: In the .NET era, Microsoft was going to rename all its products after .NET—using brands like Windows.NET, Office.NET, and so on—despite the fact that the .NET technologies, like AI today, were just ingredients, low-level components that users would never need to know or care about.

Not that this would have triggered a higher level of success, but Microsoft should have stuck to branding its products for customers and emphasized what these things can now do thanks to the wonder of AI. Or whatever marketing nonsense they care to employ. This is particularly important given how toxic the term AI is in certain circles, and it is perhaps notable that Microsoft’s Copilot terms of service presents a far more realistic view of where we are with this technology than does Microsoft’s marketing of it to customers. Being entertainment is the least of Copilot’s problems.

“Copilot tries,” it notes, “but it can make mistakes.”

“Copilot may give you wrong information … You might see Responses that seem convincing but are incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate.”

“Always use your judgment and check the information you get from Copilot before you make decisions or act.”

“You shouldn’t share any information with Copilot that you don’t want us to review [because] Copilot may include both automated and manual (human) processing of data.”

“We make no guarantees or promises about how Copilot will operate or that it will operate as intended.”

“When you request that Copilot take Actions on your behalf, you are solely responsible for those Actions and any results or consequences.”

“FOR THE SAKE OF CLARITY, WE DO NOT MAKE ANY WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION OF ANY KIND ABOUT COPILOT.” (Yes, that bit is really in all caps.)

“We don’t own Your Content, but we may use Your Content to operate Copilot and improve it. By using Copilot, you grant us permission to use Your Content, which means we can copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, edit, translate, and reformat it, and we can give those same rights to others who work on our behalf.”

“We get to decide whether to use Your Content, and we don’t have to pay you, ask your permission, or tell you when we do.”

“If you keep using Copilot after the updates take effect, you’re agreeing to those updates. If you don’t agree to the updates, you must stop using Copilot.”

And then there are the warnings about your behavior as a customer and Copilot user: You are admonished to not use Copilot to “harm yourself or others,” “violate the privacy of others,” “use Copilot to trick, lie to, or cheat others,” “infringe the rights of others,” and even “do anything illegal.” Cripes. One might argue that Copilot and other AIs can only be considered safe to use when those safeguards are built into the technology itself. You’re trust us to do all that?

So, yes, let’s enjoy a laugh because Microsoft literally describes Copilot as being only for entertainment purposes. But let’s also recognize the sobering reality that Microsoft has pushed AI aggressively and chaotically on its customers well before it was ready to do anything useful, and that it has no plans to stop that behavior at all: Its senior leadership believes that Microsoft’s relevance if not survival is contingent on it trying to win in AI, and it is willing to risk hundreds of billions of dollars and its own customer base to make that happen.

And besides, everyone else is doing it.