Clippy resurrected as AI assistant — project turns infamous Microsoft mascot into LLM interface

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Clippy resurrected as AI assistant — project turns infamous

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mascot into LLM interface

If you’re old enough to remember when 8MB thumb drives hit the scene, you’ll probably remember Clippy,

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’s digital writing assistant. Clippy lived in the bottom corner of

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Office from 1996 to 2003, but now he can return to your desktop with a new life as a mouthpiece for AI, thanks to a

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from software engineer ‪Felix Rieseberg.

This odd couple of 90’s UI design and the modern-day AI craze provides potential users the ability to set up any locally installed LLM and use Clippy as its mouthpiece. Many of the most popular publicly-available LLMs will function with Clippy, with one-click installation supported for the newest from

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, Meta,

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, and Qwen. Clippy’s original art and animations are joined by a Windows 98-styled chat and settings window.

On installation, Clippy silently cycles through animations while the program automatically downloads

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’s Gemma3-1B model. Once paired with an LLM, the Clippy-bot approximates the original Clippy’s tone thanks to a lengthy prompt instruction that seeks to disguise the model in use. Users are able to edit or replace this starting prompt to get their most Clippy-esque experience (or to give your Clippy more of his highly-memed snark).

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Rieseberg, creator of new Clippy, refers to the program as “a love letter and homage to the late, great Clippy,” as well as

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’s 90s visual aesthetic. He calls the app a piece of “software art,” or, if you don’t like it, “software satire.” There is certainly something to be said about the relationship between an artist and programmer designing a quirky writing aide character, and a chatbot later told to attempt to emulate that work — though the list of people waxing philosophical about Clippy likely doesn’t extend far beyond this author.

We’ve seen Clippy replacements before, but this new-and-improved paperclip doesn’t require access to a paid tier of ChatGPT, nor does it seek to modernize Clippy’s look to match Windows’ newer design sensibilities. This is the Clippy you know and love (?): a more 90’s-looking blend of old and new computing sensibilities.

The Clippy Desktop Assistant is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux via the

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, with a deeper look behind the curtain available on

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. While it’s not likely to revolutionize any desktop workflows, this new Clippy stands at the ready for those happy few with one foot in the vector-graphics of the 90s… and the other in the AI-present.

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#Clippy #resurrected #assistant #project #turns #infamous #

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#mascot #LLM #interface

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