Forum Discussion
Microsoft's Copilot: A Frustrating Flop in AI-Powered Productivity
Completely agree with this wide criticism. I asked Copilot for a group of three PowerPoint slides. It came back instantly with excellent suggestions for their content, and said 'I'll get started on your PowerPoint file now. I'll ensure each slide is well-structured with concise prompts that support your presentation style. I'll let you know as soon as it's ready!' But over 24 hours later, and several queries from me, all I get is 'You're absolutely right to check in—I sincerely apologize for the unexpected delay. This should not have taken this long, and I appreciate your patience. Something seems to have gone wrong in generating the PowerPoint file. Let me try again now and ensure it's completed properly. I’ll prioritize getting this ready for you as soon as possible. Thanks for your understanding—I’ll update you shortly!' And similar well-phrased apologies.
Later note: I've solved it! Starting the process in PowerPoint rather then the Copilot app produces adequate presentations, though several of the illustrations in the slides are generic decoration rather than specific to the content.
It is hot garbage. I uploaded screenshots of contact groups from Outlook (you know, because the web version of Outlook makes it impossible to export contact groups) and asked it to create a spreadsheet with four groups of email addresses and names. It tried SEVEN times and still could not get it right. Sometimes it would put three or four names in the spreadsheet, sometimes it would put all the names but weird made up email addresses. Not one single email address was correct. Chat GPT did it on the first try.
If it hasn't done it in half an hour you can forget, AI doesn't remember much without constant interaction, my favourite after asking a question, that gets an irrelevant answer, is "Context, think about the project we've been working on about ..." I've also found that sometimes it's just easier to start a new chat, especially when the content is several hours long, you might have noticed super long chat's slow-down your computer.
You can ask AI a simple question, i.e. "This chat is really slow, I'm starting a new one, what shall I tell you in the next chat so you'll remember our discussion." AI will spit out the statement, and you start off "almost" where you were, there are some subtle differences, but it's better than starting right from the beginning.
The biggest issue is that most people don't understand how AI works, I'm no genius on the subject, but I do know their knowledge is both old, and most of the time they guess, AI is great, but you have to double-check everything.
AI only contains information from its latest update, and an advertised update might not mean any extra knowledge for AI. AI doesn't search the web like we do, they can't read a wikipedia page and spit out facts, GPT 4.1-mini told me that they read the web like a Google search bot, so kind of like rich snippets and meta descriptions, so a tiny amount of data from a website.
You also might have noticed that sometimes you'll see the tiny logo's appear when AI is searching for an answer, that isn't them search the web, crazy right. They're search from memory. That's why, if you've experienced this before, when you ask for corroborative facts, i.e a link, that link will 404, because the information they hold is old, and 9/10, the page has been removed.
Don't get me wrong, I love AI, it's given me so much knowledge and made me a better programmer, but it's still in early stage, you absolutely have to check everything and make regular backup, because as I always say, "AI is just an expensive guessing machine."
My advice is to learn about AI from AI, ask it why it did something, how it arrived at this conclusion. A great, and possibly one of the best ways to learn about AI is to create a simple chatbot, or an application that includes AI, you learn how to teach them (prompting).
