To think CoPilot is fucking useless?

[DeftGoldHedgehog]

Everything I ask it to do it would have been quicker to do myself, or it's "Sorry I can't do that, Dave."

I'm asking it to file messages in my inbox into my existing folders, to see what is in each folder I've already filed and file messages accordingly. Surely this should be an easy task and ideal for AI, especially one that is supposed to be intergrated with other apps from the same creator? Apparently it can only create rules to do this or a filing strategy and can't see the Outlook 'message identifiers' to be able to move anything.

May as well go and bash my head against a wall, it would be more productive.

Agree

The other day I asked it to do three bits of formatting in an excel document, which it did, correctly after the third time of asking and it said I'd come up to my daily usage limits. 😐

YANBU. It's the technology nobody asked for. I'm so sick of constant AI slop.

I think it’s really useful. Are you logged into Microsoft 365 when you ask it to sort your inbox? That’s where I was going wrong before. It couldn’t access my emails.

Its really good at:

holiday logistics (flights, finding hotels etc)
assessing savings products (cash isas etc)
home interiors advice (upload pictures)
deciding whether to fix utility tariffs or not.
car insurance options.

stuff like that.

You have to spend more time checking it than you would have spent just doing it yourself!

I sometimes use AI (not CoPilot) to revise language for promoting events etc but even then I have to check that it hasn't randomly changed dates or times, because it has done that before.

Is it a free or paid for version? I've not used Copilot but in general I find that the free versions are getting less and less advanced (or probably rather not keeping up) while paid tools can do amazing things. I have an AI tool at work that I genuinely reckon could replace about 70% of the things I do. Even with relatively shit prompts the output is amazing. We spent a long tiem essentially training AI in return for using it for free, but that was never going to last.

Prompts are another thing, more basic tools work, but take really specific or good prompting to do so.

It's embedded in our work.systems and nobody can/will tell us the environmental costs of having it running all the time

I went on a course about how to use AI and it was very illuminating. Two main messages I brought back were..

1. Treat it like a junior member of staff - give it tasks to do, but you need to check what it's done rather than rely on it - just like how you'd manage a junior staff member.
2. Be VERY precise with your instruction - the more precise the better.

Since being on that course, I've found AI in general has been far more useful to me, i.e. I am now very specific with my request, going into great detail (just like I'd do with giving a task to a junior staff member), and I check what answers it provides (just like I'd do with a junior staff member) - that doesn't mean doing it all again myself, it means asking it for citations as to why it's come to it's answer and checking anything that looks odd. For things like Excel or Access subroutines I've asked it to create, I build in a "cross check" to check the logic of the program/subroutine it's built.

I think it depends how your IT have set it up.

Check which version you have, it sounds like you might have the more basic free version.

Yeah you need the premium version

It depends on the version you have and the licence your company have paid for. I have co pilot in my organisation as does my sister in hers. But we have completely 2 different versions. For example I was able to format and add formulas to a very complex spreadsheet. She was not

I tried to use it once to plan more fair fixtures for sports teams and no matter how specific I was, it came back with crazy setups so I gave up and went back to the usual way!

I've assumed it's me, but I can't get it to do anything useful.

Last week I tried to get a couple of different AI platforms to add some stuff to an excel doc I already had. It did it but repeatedly completely changed the formatting. Each time I went back to it with changes the layout had changed again. In the end it was changing the formatting of it's own document each time it added something. What do I need to do to get it to leave the original alone?

I don't use it. I can honestly do what I want quicker and more accurately than try to get fucking AI to give me something I can use. My work keeps pushing us to use AI more and 'work smarter'. Well, working 'smarter' for me is not even bothering with fucking AI and just doing it myself!

Having never been trained in MS Access database, I created one from scratch using AI and it's pretty impressive. I could never have done that without AI unless I'd spent a lot of time on courses or training myself.

I've got clients who've used AI to create large/complex spreadsheets.

It definitely has it's benefits, but you have to be precise and you have to watch what's it's doing, check it over, etc.

In a nutshell, extremely bad.

The rise and rise of AI datacentres means the battle against extremely damaging climate change has already been lost.

Yeah I think we have. Perhaps I can make a case for trying the premium.

I've got premium ChatGPT which I find better generally but it's not integrated with Microsoft apps and am not sure whether we'd want it to be for security reasons.

I've got used to refining instructions and so on but I just feel like there are so many internal barriers with Copilot it can be worse than the bloody paperclip. Particularly in Outlook.

No one seems to be quite getting that its winding up costing more time and money than just... paying people.

Sounds like you need to build a simple co-pilot agent to do that for you

Premium version is a game changer. It was painful and we got upgraded and now it is a god send.

It also learns the more you use it so I find it very intuitive now and super helpful.

I can ask, Please find me the email where xxx said xxx in response to xxx and it says not able to.
3 mins I found it myself.

It told me that if I bought a Home Assistant that I could control my home battery in the way I want to, so off I went and bought one. Many hours of failure, frustration and “Yes, Slippery, that’s the issue, it will definitely work this time…” and “you’re just one step away from having it all set up…” I did some more googling and found out my home battery (which it knew the brand/model of) simply cannot be controlled by a Home Assistant in the way I need it to.

I use a different model at work (lawyer) and although it can be useful it hallucinates terribly, so often doesn’t save time.

The only thing I've found it useful for so far is summarising documents when the file names are things like scan1254564, scan5674646 but even then you can only upload 10 files a time.

I'm open to learning but for example the list PP made, I have no interest in using AI for those things, why would you take interior design advice from a next word guessing machine?