Remove copilot icon that appears when I click in Onenote

EVERYBODY SHOULD CHECK THEIR MICROSOFT 365 ACCOUNT AND SUBSCRIPTION. YOPU WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY CHARGED FOR COPILOT AT RENEWAL

It will automatically have been updated to include Copilot and at renewal it will automatically be included in the fees. My family account would have gone up 30% for a service I actively don't want. To cancel it one has to go into the cancel subscription option when you get offered the "reduced" serice you were on previously as a sop to keep you on board. But you will be stuck with it until renewal, I don't know whether Copilot will disappear or you will just not have any credits to use it, possibly with a message telling youy to subscribe if you accidentally click on it.

When I have finished my PhD in a few months time, it is currently all in Office and OneDrive, I will be looking at switching to LibreOffice, perhaps even on Linux.

It is totally uacceptable that Microsoft has installed Copilot in all the Office apps without asking for our acceptance. I don't want ANY AI in my apps automatically, I want to choose myself, if I want to use AI.

Remove the automatic installation of Copilot NOW! , and give us the opportunity to make our own choisies. You will loose subscribers this way.

I'm so appalled by the intrusion of this unwanted slop machine into an app I've been using since 2012.

Now working out how to completely eliminate Microsoft from my workflow.

I've done this and it does nothing. The icon still appears next to the cursor and copilot still remains active in all office apps.

That’s the thing. It doesn’t seem like you actually found a “solution“. I also disabled and uninstalled, and it still shows the Copilot icon in OneNote.

I hate to admit this, but there actually is a viable solution for me where I don’t have to stop using Windows after 3 decades of loyalty, and that is to reformat my computer.

EDIT- after reformatting and being careful not to activate Copilot, it activated anyway and now my OneNote shows the Copilot icon no matter what I do.

But here’s the deal. Going forward, I’m going to be using a dual boot or virtual machine so that I don’t have to expose my data to Windows beyond the absolute bare minimum. I hope and anticipate that over time I will use Windows less and less and just become a Linux user.

Lastly, though it seems I share your sentiment, I don’t want to come across as being abusive of Microsoft product managers and engineers. I understand everyone is in the middle of an AI craze. But they do deserve to know that Apple seems to be navigating this with much more sophistication and grace than Microsoft. I have much higher confidence that Apple is going to keep my data private. That isn’t because I know how their back end is architected, it’s because I can see Microsoft‘s commitment to opt-in policies reflected on my own computer.