Microsoft 365 Copilot Brings So Called AI To More Offices

Is It Lying To Your Clients When An AI Does It For You?

Microsoft 365 Copilot was made available to a select number of businesses in March and is now being offered to more, for an unspecified amount of money to join.  This takes Microsoft’s new business model to a new level, instead of offering you the chance to beta test for them for free you now have the opportunity to pay them for the privilege of testing their software before it is ready for general release.  If one was enough of a sucker to buy into this plan, they will be able to unleash the power of ChatGPT-4 upon their coworkers and clients.

If you haven’t been paying too much attention to the behind the scenes findings of LLMs such as ChatGPT, they have become very famous in some circles for their ability to hallucinate.  That is the official term given to AI applications that fabricate data, invent non-existent citations, provide contradictory answers and generally lie to those using them.  LLMs, aka AIs, also have no qualms in poaching private data which was not well secured nor in writing eye-wateringly insecure code.  Microsoft 365 Copilot will bring these features to the corporate world, which is already quite good at the aforementioned without needing electronic assistance.

The features available to subscribers will include a search function, called Semantic Index, which instead of searching for keywords will instead search for keywords, but add extraneous context to the results.  This is of course assuming it doesn’t invent the answer if it can’t find results it’s algorithm considers to be of high enough quality.  It will also incorporate OpenAI’s DALL-E text-to-image generator into PowerPoint, giving you the opportunity to unknowingly poach and incorporate copyrighted art into your slide deck.

Microsoft have of course slapped a warning that some of the data which Copilot produces will be inaccurate, which along with their war chest will likely shield them from any legal liabilities from their clients.  It is unlikely that a company which depends on Copilot, only to be sued by their customers for fraud, will have any such protection.