I want to turn off or hide the draft with copilot dingbat that follows my cursor around in MS Word.

EDIT: This didn't work. It did temporarily, but it came back.

These instructions in another thread did work:

Hello Michael_Win98se_fan,

Some users in the community have reported that rolling back the Office version can turn off Copilot, so you can try that:

Restore your version of Office

Close all Office software, in the "Start Menu", find "Command Prompt" (or "cmd"), right-click and select "Run as administrator" ;

At the command prompt, type the following command and press Enter:

cd %programfiles% \Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun  
  

Then enter the following and press Enter

Officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.17531.20120 
  

This will bring Office back to a stable version in February 2024.

If the above steps are successful, you'll be able to view Office version 17531.20120 under File -> Account -> Product Information. If another version is displayed here, it means that some of the steps were not executed successfully, please refer to the previous method and try again.

After restoring, open any Office application, such as Word, click File -> account. On the right side, check the "Microsoft 365 and Office Updates" heading , click the "Update Options" button, and select the "Disable Updates" option to disable the auto-update feature.

Please consider turning on automatic updates again after successfully switching to Classic to avoid updating again to a new version with Copilot.

I hope this is useful and please feel free to ask any questions.

Best wishes

Miyeon.S- MSFT |Microsoft Community Support Specialist

So I asked Copilot in Word "How do I remove the Copilot icon from my document?" and it responded with this:

It seems like you're looking to remove the Copilot icon from your Word document. Unfortunately, I cannot make changes to your document directly. However, I can provide some guidance on how you might be able to do this.

To remove the Copilot icon from the ribbon in Word, you can follow these steps:

Open Word and go to the File menu.
Select Options.
In the Word Options dialog box, go to the Customize Ribbon section.
In the right pane, find the Copilot icon and uncheck it to remove it from the ribbon.
Click OK to save your changes.

If you want to turn off Copilot entirely, you might need to adjust your account privacy settings:

Go to File > Account > Account Privacy > Manage Settings.
Clear the checkbox for Turn on experiences that analyze your content.
Click OK and restart Word.

Please note that turning off Copilot might also disable other features in your Microsoft 365 apps1.

I hope this helps! If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

It seems to have worked!