No, really it is. But not for reasons you might think. This isn’t some tedious anti-AI rant. It’s a disgruntled moan at Microsoft being Microsoft and half-arsing something just to keep up.
So here’s my complaint. It’s just very very bad compared to more capable LLMs in the exact same way Internet Explorer was bad, Bing is kind of terrible and the Zune was a nice enough idea but everyone went and bought an iPod instead.
What am I on about? well here’s a perfectly reasonable prompt that actually did what I want…
I asked it to make me a picture, it made me a picture. Happy days. I have about 12 more to make. So, you know I ask it for another
And instead of actually doing it, it just tells me what it would do, if I asked it and to then ask it to do the thing.
And that … doesn’t work? Instead it has a bit of a crisis.
Why do I have to tell my software off just to make it behave? It’s kind of stupid.
Other ways Copilot manages to annoy me on a regular basis include
- Despite being a Microsoft product, it integrates very badly with the rest of their tools. It can write to my SharePoint and OneDrive stores, but it stashes files in an obscure folder
- I’m assuming where I work is paying for this, so why does it randomly just go “nah no more images today”
- Ask it to make a PowerPoint slideshow… I dare you. Then watch as it appears to write a Python script that calls some 3rd party PowerPoint creation library. The end result will either be a 5:4 aspect ratio mess or something that obeys no rules for making a PowerPoint slideshow. There’ll be text boxes of random sizes everywhere and instead of making a slideshow about a topic it makes a PowerPoint containing the executive overview of what the PowerPoint would be about…
Stay in your lane Microsoft and stick to releasing buggy operating systems and business software we’re all forced to use. Let someone else hoover up the world’s supply of hardware and power.
