'Talking To Windows' Copilot AI Makes a Computer Feel Incompetent' (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0180127987
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/18/1932202/talking-to-windows-copilot-ai-makes-a-computer-feel-incompetent
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/report/822443/microsoft-windows-copilot-vision-ai-assistant-pc-voice-controls-impressions
About a third of the time it provided directions to find the photo in File Explorer. On two occasions it explained how to launch Google Chrome. Four times it offered advice about booking flights to Belize. The cave is Rio Secreto in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Microsoft spokesperson Blake Manfre said "Copilot Actions on Windows, which can take actions on local files, is not yet available." He described it as "an opt-in experimental feature that will be coming soon to Windows Insiders in Copilot Labs, starting with a narrow set of use cases while we optimize model performance and learn." Copilot cannot toggle basic Windows settings like dark mode. When asked to analyze a benchmark table in Google Sheets, it "constantly misread clear-as-day scores both in the spreadsheet and in the on-page review."
[1] https://www.theverge.com/report/822443/microsoft-windows-copilot-vision-ai-assistant-pc-voice-controls-impressions
Time to rename it (Score:3)
to Drunken Passenger.
"Feel" incompetent? (Score:2)
Seriously, it's totally incompetent.
Apple was right... (Score:3)
...to hold back on shipping a piece of trash. Yes, Apple got a carried away with their advertising ("Ready for Apple Intelligence!"), but rightly held back on shipping garbage.
Microsoft Distilled to its Essence = Copilot (Score:3)
Microsoft desperately wants to sell us a vision of the PC being an "agentic" device. You speak, it responds. Except, they're creating the equivalent of a blind and deaf person being peddled as an expert in all things. It can't read the files on the computer? It can't respond with answers clearly spelled out in the content currently pulled up on the screen? And apparently it can't understand simple questions well enough to even fully grok the scope or domain of the query itself.
Maybe one of the AI pushing tech companies could try to work through the shit-show of pre-alpha state software in their own labs before attempting to foist it off on developers or "insiders" or, more often, the end users? Maybe, just maybe, we'd have a better perspective on AI if we didn't have so much of it shoved in our faces while it's half baked and nowhere near ready to fulfill even the most basic tasks it's being sold as the perfect solution for? But it seems more and more likely that we'll just let the entirety of humanity drown in the refuse pile that half baked AI is creating. Nobody seems at all interested in saying, "How about we get it functional before we shove it out the door?"
You're preaching to the choir (Score:2)
Most of the people on Slashdot have been screaming that the emperor has no clothes for a while now. Building a machine that spits out semi-plausible dialogue is very different from making an intelligent machine. I just asked Google's AI to summarize information about myself (my own name from my own town) and it rather hilariously indicated that my wife was actually my (IRL) sister. It had apparently retrieved the names from an obituary for our grandparent but didn't actually understand the relationships.
Re: You're preaching to the choir (Score:2)
Yup Tis a bubble.
Re: (Score:3)
That's one possibility. The other possibility is that we have reached AGI and you need to have a long talk with your mother.
Re: (Score:2)
I tried to use a chat tool to write a bash script that would prompt for username and file system, for a quota change.
Was total garbage.
I'm not a coder; just a stupid admin but how are folks using these tools for programming?
Re: You're preaching to the choir (Score:2)
> Most of the people on Slashdot have been screaming that the emperor has no clothes for a while now
rsilvergun has been screaming even louder about how AI as we have it now it's already the end of the world, and that society isn't "ready" for it until he says it is.
Funny coincidence, two hours ago I just finished two cavern dives in the very cenote complex in Playa del Carmen TFS alluded to. Some of the best diving I've done yet (comes really close to diving with tiger and bull sharks.) Currently on my second margarita while having a rest Doing another two cavern dives tomorrow.
Re: (Score:2)
> rsilvergun has been screaming even louder about how AI as we have it now it's already the end of the world, and that society isn't "ready" for it until he says it is.
Since he's living rent-free in your head, can we assume you're the one responsible for the rsilvergun-impersonating LLM spam?
Re: (Score:2)
> Since he's living rent-free in your head
This statement was cute, even funny, the first few times that it was used. That was because it was such an absurd way of making that point.
But, after this statement has been repeated so many times, it's just fucking stupid now. You should consider abandoning it before people start thinking that you are stupid.
Ads don't tell the truth? (Score:2)
Call me shocked!
Re: (Score:2)
That's one of the reasons ad blockers were created, to block the bullshit.
What, an advertisement for AI lied? (Score:2)
Color me shocked. Shocked!
When I see "agentic" I always read it as "agnatic", which somehow makes it less stupid.
Yet another Windows demo... (Score:2)
... that overpromises and underdelivers... what a surprise.
Copilot itself is pretty bad (Score:1)
I just asked it earlier to generate a simple Excel file, something I should think that a Microsoft AI should... excel at, and the excel file was broken, unusuable. The one thing I would think it would be good at and it failed.
Good at one thing (Score:2)
There is one thing that CoPilot is good at, and that is searching your files. Windows Explorer search has always blown goats, but Outlook search used to be good and sucks now, and OneNote search is merely passable. I suppose it isn't surprising a tool made via data scraping is good at scraping data but if you can't find something due to lack of functional search on your work PC give it a go and it does a pretty decent job.
Windows needed an enema yesterday (Score:3)
It's just so full of shit. It's a wonder it even runs anymore.
At least the linux marketshare is slowly but steadily increasing, so I approve of the enshittification of windows. No better marketing than what they do themselves.
AI is a roll of the dice. Feeling lucky punk? (Score:2)
Random number generators were not intended to be used to make AI decisions. But here we are. A real AI would always give the same answer even if that answer is wrong. And that answer would not change unless the base data changes. You can't do that though with current large-set-databases queried with a random number generator.
Learn from Apple (Score:2)
Steve Jobs would not release a product until it actually did what they claimed it would do. I don't understand why this is some strangely difficult lesson for CEOs to understand. I suppose with the success of Musk and his ilk that idea seems quaint.
Re: (Score:2)
> Steve Jobs would not release a product until it actually did what they claimed it would do.
You mean like when he claimed the iPhone would be all webapps?
Let's face it, Jobs' only superpower was being a super dick to employees. This can only take you so far.
i'd feel bad too if i were a microsoft product (Score:1)
while i acknowledge that as a windows user I should feel bad, it's surprising to see their AI feels the same
Computers don't "feel" anything (Score:2)
In spite of the advances in AI
Re: (Score:2)
Ha. I can't access the article to be sure, but I think they mean making the user feel like the computer is incompetent, not making the computer feel bad about its performance like Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Re: (Score:2)
Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.
I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But