I had low expectations for AI, and it is even less useful than I expected.
My work procured me a copilot license and it really is disappointing. It’s wrong or overly vague most of the time, and just generally doesn’t answer questions in a useful way. Copilot in the IDE is marginally more useful but it rarely gives you an efficient answer and obviously it’s never anything novel, it’s just copy and pasting from stackoverflow answers (or questions even.)
I miss functioning web searches.
AI is filled with as much, if not more, SEO designed slop as web searches do now but it is presented as if the user clicked “I feel lucky”.
Colour me surprised
I have copilot at work and honestly it’s not worth the price.
The number of times it has created grossly inaccurate meeting notes or summary items basically means I can’t trust it to be shared with someone who wasn’t there, so it’s mostly just there as a roll the dice memory jogger for participants.
The components embedded in office apps like PowerPoint are absolutely useless, and that’s where I really wanted it to help.
I’ve used co-pilot too: Not impressed. AI is largely unreliable garbage, at least at the moment.
I’d be more forgiving, but what MS Copilot sucks at the worst is working with Office files: PowerPoint: completely useless
Excel: useful for some tasks if I reformat all my sheets into tables, so mostly useless
Word: can’t even answer why the formatting of the file from my coworker is a mess (which is every coworker), let alone try to fix it. But it will gladly take a succinct piece of information and make it into an insufferable 50 pages of fluff. It summarizes documents well and helps with reviews.
OneNote: creating content it’s ok, but useless at retrieving info.
Outlook: It tries to help, mostly confirms that my language is may be perceived as cold and offensive. Which is good, because that was my intention.
It is surprisingly helpful with PDFs and extracting data and cleaning up formatting.
Unsurprising, it does great with CSV and other open data formats. Maybe there is a lesson here?
I think the lesson here is that proprietary binary formats are way more difficult for a LLM to parse.
If only we could use plaintext for everything…
I’ve heard that copilot is specifically useless. Mostly gets in the way.
I like Copilot. [Blajah does not support downvotes.]
