As long as you treat AI/Copilot like a child it becomes more useful.
Today I made the classic mistake of thinking that AI can understand English. Repeatedly I would give simple instructions and Copilot would parrot back to me that it understood.
Then I do would do what I said I was going to do, and Copilot acted like it just stepped into existence. Past conversation forgotten, and like Lenny looking at the pretty flowers.
For example, I tried to upload about 63 documents so that I could merge and manipulate them. I told Copilot exactly what I was going to do, and I told it exactly how to act. I said I am going to upload 63 documents, and I want you to confirm that you got each document and continue to prompt me to upload until those 63 documents are complete and then we will analyze them.
What do you think Copilot did? After the first set of documents it wants to summarize each of the ten documents. Did I ask that? No. Did I tell it to act that way. No. Did I want that? No. Did it prompt me to continue to upload documents? No. Did I have to tell it again that I wanted to be prompted to upload documents until I was done? Yes. Did it remember? No. Did it try to analyze the documents in a way that I didn’t ask for while I was uploading? Yes. Did I tell it again by copying and pasting what I wrote? Yes. Did it remember? No.
So how is copilot helping me? I’ve had more intelligent help with Notepadd++ which I had to use to fix another Copilot issue. If your software is working against you, how can you justify charging for it? It isn’t a time saver, it is a time waster.
I told it to remember the instructions and it learned to verify the number of documents uploaded and the running total in that session. Still at the end it still couldn’t analyze the documents it said it could in any meaningful way. Pathetic.
Now to be fair they were from different schema, formats and so on but there was very little pattern recognition that was done. I had to tell it every little thing and it was frustrating. People who are using Copilot now are probably wondering why they are paying for it.