How Microsoft's New Co-pilot Poses Risks for Workspaces

Betting the Farm on ChatGPT

ChatGPT opened to the public on November 30, 2022. The AI chat machine, backed by Microsoft as an investor, has attracted a lot of attention since its launch. In its first two months, ChatGPT was used by more than 100 million users, giving Microsoft a glimpse of how ChatGPT could play an important role in the future of our daily lives.

As Microsoft is introducing its contentious AI tools into the mainstream, their recent decision to prioritize the deployment of these products ahead of the competition raises concerns about their lack of emphasis on long-term, socially responsible considerations. While teams like Microsoft's Ethics and Society department typically serve as a check on big tech firms by identifying potential social or legal repercussions, their absence could leave AI vulnerable to significant societal harm.

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Co-pilot is designed to live in Office Products as an interactive assistant

Word Document Simulation

By utilizing the copilot function available in Microsoft Word, you can benefit from its capabilities to write, edit, summarize, and create documents. With a simple prompt, Copilot generates an initial draft for you and incorporates relevant information from your organization. Copilot has the ability to append content to an existing document, condense text, and rephrase either sections or the entirety of a document to enhance its concision. Furthermore, Copilot can assist you in refining your writing skills by proposing strategies to fortify your arguments and eradicate any inconsistencies.

Although the Microsoft copilot is expected to provide exceptional versatility, it has the possibility of producing prejudiced replies due to inherent biases and prejudices in the text data that ChatGPT is trained on. Therefore, it is possible that the AI may generate biased or discriminatory responses unknowingly. For example: when it comes to using copilot and asking copilot to summarize the funding history of OpenAI.

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It's important to remember that Copilot is a tool meant to assist developers and improve their productivity, not to replace human creativity and critical thinking skills. To avoid potential issues, individuals using Copilot in any context should make to use the tool ethically and responsibly.

Bias: There are concerns that Copilot may perpetuate biases and inequalities in the software development industry. This is because the tool is trained on existing code, which may have implicit biases or discriminatory patterns.

Information accuracy: There are concerns about the validity of text written using Copilot. As the tool operates by analyzing and synthesizing text from across the internet, there will need to be rigorous fact-checking in the news room.

Outlook Email Simulation

In terms of Microsoft Outlook, we often struggle with the reading and response time generated by the sheer volume of email in our daily life, but the Copilot feature in Outlook can help reduce the time we spend on email triage and increase our productivity in communication. It can summarize complex email threads involving multiple people, allowing us to grasp different perspectives and unanswered questions.

Regarding ChatGPT's limitations in composing emails, the major drawback is that although its output resembles art, it lacks the genuine artistic expression. ChatGPT is incapable of generating content that can stir up human emotions like a human does because it lacks actual thoughts and emotions. One notable example is the overuse of "I" at the beginning of sentences, which is discouraged in writing. This is demonstrated in the following demo by ChatGPT.

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While AI text generators can be a useful tool for email writing, they should be used with caution. It's important to carefully review and edit any text generated by these tools to ensure that it is appropriate, accurate, and reflects the intended message.

Misinterpretation of context: An AI text generator may not always understand the context in which an email is being written, leading to inappropriate or confusing responses. This can cause frustration and misunderstandings between the sender and the recipient.

Lack of personalization: While an AI text generator may be able to produce grammatically correct and coherent sentences, it may lack the personal touch that comes with writing an email from scratch. This can make the email seem impersonal and robotic, potentially harming the relationship between the sender and the recipient.

The Future Of CoPilot

Currently, the co-pilot feature is solely accessible on five products owned by Microsoft. Undoubtedly, integrating a co-pilot tool in our workflow can significantly enhance our productivity, efficiency, and overall user experience. Nevertheless, there are numerous intricacies, such as design, language, and functionality that require further refinement before the tool can become fully operational.

Looking towards the future, advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), like ChatGPT, hold the potential to revolutionize our daily lives. We could potentially see a shift away from traditional text input towards more intuitive voice and AI interactions. However, until such innovations become mainstream, we should remain vigilant of potential unexpected developments beyond our current understanding.