It pains me to defend an AI feature, but this whole tweet is disingenuous and stupid. The documentation for =COPILOT() says a few things which are relevant to understand what we’re seeing here:
You’re not supposed to use it for math
It only has access to the parts of the spreadsheet you pass it as the second argument
In this case the user has not provided copilot any cells to look at, so they’re just asking what the typical answer on the Internet is for the request “sum the numbers above”. And the sum of numbers above things are apparently often 15.
The issue isn’t about what it can and can’t do, it’s that it is CONSTANTLY attempting to step in and “fix” my spreadsheet in bizarrely inane ways. Why won’t it give me the “shut up and stay the fuck out of my way” option? There is no option to remove or silence copilot. That damn thing follows my cursor like a ring wraith after Frodo. It has already fucked up more than one of my spreadsheets without asking or being asked. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might not have caught the absolutely bat shit insane edits it was making to simple and correct functions I’d already entered. No, copilot you don’t know what I’m doing. Clippy was less intrusive.
Is the analogy like giving access to a nuclear reactor to users and giving them access to AI to help them run the nuclear plant by allowing the AI to give users the most common answers and responses into how to run a nuclear power plant.
People do all sorts of weird non-math stuff in Excel. The stated use-case for this feature is stuff that operates on text. Say for example you fill column A with quotes from your customers about your product. Then you can tell Copilot to provide a summary of each row in column B, and whether the sentiment is positive or negative in column C. You could aggregate the results as well.
There are better tools for that sort of thing, but a lot of people really love their Excel hammer, and they see nails everywhere.
True, I did forget that it might have been useful for me in one very specific instance where there was a comments section in one of our excel forms and I wanted to summarize the most common words mentioned in those comments. Couldn’t figure out how at the time but this could potentially have figured it out. Not sure I would trust the accuracy of it’s result though
It pains me to defend an AI feature, but this whole tweet is disingenuous and stupid. The documentation for
=COPILOT()says a few things which are relevant to understand what we’re seeing here:In this case the user has not provided copilot any cells to look at, so they’re just asking what the typical answer on the Internet is for the request “sum the numbers above”. And the sum of numbers above things are apparently often 15.
If it’s “not supposed to be used for math” then it should pop a modal that says “I don’t do math”.
The issue isn’t about what it can and can’t do, it’s that it is CONSTANTLY attempting to step in and “fix” my spreadsheet in bizarrely inane ways. Why won’t it give me the “shut up and stay the fuck out of my way” option? There is no option to remove or silence copilot. That damn thing follows my cursor like a ring wraith after Frodo. It has already fucked up more than one of my spreadsheets without asking or being asked. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might not have caught the absolutely bat shit insane edits it was making to simple and correct functions I’d already entered. No, copilot you don’t know what I’m doing. Clippy was less intrusive.
Big part of the problem with AI features is that way too many people believe they are silver bullet for everything and they are marketed like that.
Computer savvy people know better ways of doing math and can figure out that context is needed.
Overwhelming majority of people, including bosses and managers, are too lazy and ignorant to care about the points you mention.
Keep in mind that if you allow a user to make this mistake, people will DEFINITELY make this mistake. A lot.
Dont you just tell the AI to make no mistakes
That is true for a lot of things, particularly every AI feature ever.
And if that’s true, just imagine something any more compex, that could get lost amid the rest of the slop for a long time
Is the analogy like giving access to a nuclear reactor to users and giving them access to AI to help them run the nuclear plant by allowing the AI to give users the most common answers and responses into how to run a nuclear power plant.
Every job is just some sort of troubleshooting, it just makes it harder to do when your manual is making stuff up
… You aren’t supposed to use it for math… In excel? What is the point?
People do all sorts of weird non-math stuff in Excel. The stated use-case for this feature is stuff that operates on text. Say for example you fill column A with quotes from your customers about your product. Then you can tell Copilot to provide a summary of each row in column B, and whether the sentiment is positive or negative in column C. You could aggregate the results as well.
There are better tools for that sort of thing, but a lot of people really love their Excel hammer, and they see nails everywhere.
True, I did forget that it might have been useful for me in one very specific instance where there was a comments section in one of our excel forms and I wanted to summarize the most common words mentioned in those comments. Couldn’t figure out how at the time but this could potentially have figured it out. Not sure I would trust the accuracy of it’s result though