Someone Made an Actual AI Clippy

AI always reminds me of Clippy, the infamous talking paperclip added to Microsoft Office in the '90s. This little guy frustrated users, was based on a faulty understanding of how people want to use technology, and had a way of showing up even after you specifically turned it off.

It was probably inevitable, then, for someone to make a tool that combines large language models and the 30-year-old animated paperclip. That someone is developer Felix Rieseberg, who built a Windows 95-themed Clippy app that can run real large language models on your computer. The application is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux devices, and works offline.

Clippy looks just the way you remember and hovers over whatever you're working on. He cycles through several animations. Click on him to start chatting, the way you would with any other large language model. The application works offline, meaning you can chat with Clippy on a train or airplane if you really want to.

To be clear: this is not intended to be a functional tool. Rieseberg calls it an art project he made just because it's fun. "If you get as little as a small chuckle out of it, I’m happy to hear it," says the project's "about" page.

Even so, Clippy is probably the easiest tool I've come across for running large language models locally on a computer. Just download the application, install it, then choose which model you want to run in the Windows 95 themed preferences. The default, Google's Gemma, works well enough.

Credit: Justin Pot

This application is based on Ollama, an open source application built by Meta which makes it possible to run a variety of large language models on your own computer. Clippy offers eight different models to try out. Generally, the larger they are the more system resources they'll take to use—you can try a few different ones to get a feel for how well they work on your device. It's fun, if not entirely practical. Clippy can't access the internet, so you can't get real-time information, and the responses aren't as sophisticated as what you'd get from a top-of-the-line AI service.

There are a few more things you can tweak in the settings, including the default font and whether Clippy should always be on the top. You can also write your own system prompt for Clippy, allowing you to take control of his personality.

This AI-powered art project isn't going to change the world, and it's not supposed to. It's a piece of art, like this musical masterpiece Clippy inspired earlier this year.

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