Microsoft's Copilot: A Frustrating Flop in AI-Powered Productivity

I tried to use Copilot today to write an article for cyber security awareness month in October. It started to write it, but then came back and said it could not because of some lame excuse. I pushed back and said I'm not asking it to do any hacking, I just want an article to make employees aware of how AI is used by both hackers and defenders in the war on cyber crimes. I mentioned this information is easily found on the web and mainstream media sites and I'm not asking it to divulge any secrets or how to hack. It apologized, then started to write, but then again said it could not. 

I then used two other AI agents we are testing before deciding who we want to use, and both wrote the article without hesitation and did a very good job and met my word length requirements in the first try. 

I then came back to Copilot and told it the other two AI agents I used created the article on the first prompt with no excuses. Copilot said it understood my frustration and apologized and gave a lame excuse about the prompt I used saying it could be because I used the words AI and cybersecurity in the prompt. So, I told it to rewrite the prompt so it (Copilot) could complete the task. 

It rewrote the prompt and then asked if I wanted it to write the article. Yes, that's my whole point of the prompt! So it went ahead and finally wrote it. But when it can back, it was very short at 571 words and was just a list of bullet points. I told it I wanted 1,000 words and as an article in paragraph form with subheadings. It revised it to about 750 words. While most of the bullet points were gone, most of the paragraphs were one sentence. 

Since I already had two very good options from the other AI agents, I threw in the towel and gave up. Now I have a team of people comparing the three articles so they can tell which one is the best. After which I'll let them know they were all written by AI and by which model, which will help determine who our AI vendor will be. 

Stephanie, I completely understand your frustration with Copilot. If Microsoft wants Copilot to be a success, they have work to do. And the scary part that Microsoft doesn't seem to have realized yet, when users have experiences like we've had, and you hear Microsoft is using AI and laying off people because they are using AI, when you encounter a new flaw or security threat in their products, the first thing you will think of will be, did this happen because they used Copilot to write the code?