Microsoft Just Brought Back Clippy and People Actually Cheered for Him

Nostalgia is weird. It turns out all you have to do is wait 25 years and the thing everyone hated suddenly becomes a fan favorite. Case in point: Clippy.

Yes, that Clippy. The little animated paperclip who haunted Microsoft Office in the early 2000s, always popping up to ask if you were writing a letter (even when you weren't), and generally annoying the entire world. He was officially retired in 2003, became the butt of a million memes, and faded into the dusty corners of internet history. Until now.

This week, during a big Microsoft event showing off new AI features, the company teased something… unexpected. While unveiling updates to their AI assistant, Copilot, they mentioned they were experimenting with customizable avatars to give your AI a personality — and one of those avatars was none other than our old friend, Clippy.

And the crowd cheered.

What timeline is this?

To be clear, this isn't the same Clippy who stalked your Word docs. Copilot is Microsoft's very advanced, OpenAI-powered assistant. It now has memory, can browse the web for you, generate podcasts, analyze your photos, and more. And soon, it'll be able to take on visual avatars — like a mushroom, a bird, a robot… or Clippy.

The point is: your AI can now have a personality. A look. A vibe. And for those of us who live off nostalgia (hello, fellow millennials), Clippy is back in the chat — not as a productivity nightmare, but as a customizable, lovable throwback.

It's wild how fast tech goes from being mocked to being celebrated, but maybe this says more about us than it does about Clippy. After all, he was just trying to help.