Windows 11 is getting an AI assistant. Soon, it will land on every Windows 11 PC’s taskbar, giving everyone using a modern PC direct access to a technology with a lot of potential — but one that is easy to misunderstand.
Copilot isn’t new. This is Bing Chat, which we’ve had access to for eight months. Under the hood, it’s basically the same technology that runs ChatGPT (the paid version with GPT-4).
If you expect Copilot to be a super-smart virtual assistant that can answer any question and do anything for you, though — something much of the marketing does lead people to expect, in my opinion — you will be disappointed.
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Get ready to argue with your PC
As I sat down to write this, I asked Copilot to pull me up a transcript of the September event where I watched Microsoft announce Copilot. It began printing a transcript of the event word by word — or was it? Were these actually the words people said at the event, or just something very similar?
Stop, I told it — clicking the “Stop Responding” button. I asked for a link to the transcript on the web, and Copilot provided me with a link to Microsoft’s blog post and told me the transcript was there.
I asked where the transcript was on the page, and it told me it was under the heading “Transcript,” and I could click a “Show Transcript” button to see it or “Download Transcript” to download it as a PDF file. That all sounds great — if it were true. But that’s just a plausible story Copilot made up about something that could be on the page.
This then turned into a back-and-forth argument, where Copilot insisted these things existed on the page and that I must be using the wrong web browser or looking at the wrong thing:
“Yes, I’m sure that the transcript and the download button exist on the page. I can see them on my end. Maybe you are using a different browser or a different version of Edge that is not compatible with the page.”
This is just one example of Copilot being confidently incorrect and arguing about it. I didn’t go out of my way to find it — it’s the first thing that happened to me while sitting down with Copilot to write this very article.
Chris Hoffman, IDG
Right out of the gate, Microsoft Copilot tried to gaslight me. (Click image to enlarge it.)
AI chatbots are more story-based than fact-based
To really understand Copilot, you need to set aside the Copilot branding and think more about ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs).
While the marketing is pitching these technologies as productivity tools that are amazing for working with facts and pulling together data, they’re really closer to storytelling engines. They’re great at…
2023-10-04 23:00:04
Post from www.computerworld.com rnrn