Gates to Roll Out “Clippy OA”

Seeking to revive one of its most-beloved and innovative interface elements — the helpful, cheerful, and handsome talking paperclip known as “Clippy” — while expanding on its recent push for a more “open science” approach via preprints, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — in conjunction with Gates’ former company Microsoft — is rolling out an AI-powered OA tool they are calling “Clippy OA.”

Here’s how Clippy OA will work:

1. Over a span of weeks or months, Clippy OA will process user inputs to determine if the user is a scientist, physician, or scholar
   1. Internal documents show this determination will be based on the use of polysyllabic words, predictable passive-aggressive responses to questions, and an abnormally high prevalence of self-referential statements
2. Once determined, Clippy OA will collect work product across the various Microsoft products on the user’s machine — Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams — and when a sufficient amount is collected, will distill the work into the form of a scientific paper using the AI technologies of ChatGPT
3. This work product paper will then be immediately posted to Gates Open Research as a preprint, assigned a DOI, and made available for post-publication review
4. All works will be covered by a new Creative Commons license invented by ChatGPT, the CC-BY-BY-BY license, also referred to as CC-NSYNC.
   1. This license covers the human authors (BY), the LLM contribution (BY), and any overlap (BY)

The Gates Foundation is anticipating this approach will vastly increase the number of preprints made available, and spike interest in them as information from private emails, secret notes, direct chats, username/password memos, shopping histories, secret recipe files, and more will be swept up by the AI tool to be published and preserved as part of the scholarly record.

Speaking on behalf of the Gates Foundation, Flashy Gnarly said, “This is in keeping with our commitment to open science, which means anything generated by a scientist — whether it’s a structured abstract, pained sports metaphor, great ribs recipe, dumb comment, or casual sext — should be and will be made public and preserved for posterity.”

One researcher who wished to remain anonymous and agreed to communicate only via a Linux terminal they immediately disconnected and destroyed, was aghast at the idea. “OK, so I don’t sext or whatever, but Clippy sucks, and I have a pot roast recipe I do not want shared. This is too far!”

Users will have the ability to opt-out of Clippy OA, but will lose all Gates funding and access to some of the better Microsoft fonts.

Asked for comment, Apple’s spokesperson said, “We don’t extort information from our users. Privacy is paramount, and we’ll always protect your data as long as you don’t buy some lame Android stuff.”

Microsoft is also developing a smartwatch to go with Clippy OA to gather biometric data from scientists and scholars, with one possible outcome to see how well those sexts are working. The null hypothesis is unflattering.