Surely You Can't Be Serious

You may have heard the news that Microsoft recently shoved its Copilot AI tool into Excel by creating the =COPILOT() function. I'm going to be honest with you: Up until three hours ago, I knew almost nothing about this, and even now I still know almost nothing about it. This is partly because I'm not a spreadsheet person, which is putting it mildly. To be frank, spreadsheets scare me.

To conduct research for this week's newsletter, I quickly skimmed this Defector piece, and then I did a two-minute search for "Microsoft Copilot," during which I accidentally went straight to copilot.microsoft.com when the URL filled in automatically. Here's what I've learned:

It turns out that Copilot AI and I have two things in common! Neither of us provide much value when shoved into a spreadsheet, and both of us are unreliable when it comes to basic arithmetic. To be fair, I can do arithmetic, as long as I can write it down, but I can't do it in my head. And you know, this is kind of an ego boost because I've got a leg up on Copilot, which cannot guarantee a correct answer at all. In fact, Microsoft recommends you don't use it for math, period. In a spreadsheet. Where I am pretty sure people do math.

I know, another newsletter in which someone laughs scornfully at GenAI. Not so scornfully, I argue! Copilot and I both struggle with arithmetic, and I bet we're also both empaths.

But seriously, I am not so focused on the great sinkhole that is the tech industry's failing AI gold rush. We have been here before, and we will be here again. The Underpants Gnomes are ever busy. What gets me are two things:

1. There's a clearer warning about not using Copilot for basic math than there is about entrusting your most intimate secrets and personal medical information to ChatGPT while also asking it for help and guidance, and
2. When you do a Google search for "copilot" or "co-pilot" or even – and this makes me real mad – "copilot -microsoft" the entire first page of results are all about Microsoft Copilot or, the case of the last option, a mix of Microsoft Copilot information found elsewhere besides the Microsoft website, along with a link about a band called Copilot. To find anything about a co-pilot of an airplane, I had to specify "co-pilot airplane." Wikipedia reminded me this person is technically known as the "first officer" but I forget things a lot, so I have to do really dumb searches now and again to try and remember them, and it is wild to me (although not at all surprising) that the commonplace term we've all been using for decades now has to be qualified to even show up as a search result, in favor of a new AI product from a big tech company that can't even reliably add up numbers.

PERFORMING CALCULATIONS IS LITERALLY THE MAIN REASON COMPUTERS WERE INVENTED

Until next Wednesday!

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