Forum Discussion
Powerpoint Copilot generates unrelated and nonsensical slides
I have been using Copilot for Office in a case that seemed perfect, namely generating slides in PowerPoint from a Word document.
I got quite strange results, i.e., the first version of the slides is good, if I then ask for a modification such as reducing the number of slides (which Copilot in the chat seems to have understood correctly), the result was repeatedly the same, i.e., it proposes me nonsensical slides about... the history of Istanbul (!?!).
I don't have any material on Istanbul nor have I ever researched it, so I think (I hope) that it is some kind of Easter Egg popping up when Copilot doesn't understand the command, otherwise it would be a really serious problem. In the screenshots you can see that Copilot interpreted the command correctly, but the result is completely wrong.
I repeated the same sequence several times, starting from scratch, and the result was always the same, i.e., slides about Istanbul.
What's happening here?
5 Replies
massimobarsotti still happening today. I’m using Copilot to create teaching presentations and suddenly it will go through all the usual steps and produce a beautiful presentation about the history of Istanbul. I searched my materials in case they mentioned Istanbul but then found your post. Istanbul is beautiful btw.
- I had a reply from Microsoft Support, the feature can be used only to generate slides, but it is not able to apply further editing to the initial set of slides. The Instanbul deck comes from an internal demo, apparently Copilot reverts to it when in doubt (crazy, isn't it?)
- Seems like some type of hallucination. Definitely give a thumbs down on that. Maybe when you ask for the reduction of slides to reference the file again in the prompt? Or on the original prompt make it explicit in the prompt to only be 20 slides? Definitely a strange one!
Chris_Ferraro agree, it's really weird. Copilot seems to have understood the task and then, a guide to Istanbul! Could you imagine my face? And repeating the same sequence produces always slides on Istanbul, more or less with the same content. BTW I have nothing against Istanbul, all the contrary, I'd love to visit the city, but I do not need help on that right now.
- I just saw a video on the button more in the center of PowerPoint to create a Presentation, it builds a little differently. I'd be curious if the output is different.
