I have Copilot at work, it feels so useless sometimes. As an example, I had a report which I needed to make some batch edits to. I figured why not let the robot take a crack at it, so I clicked the Copilot button and spent a couple minutes describing what I needed changed.
Copilot tells me it can't edit my current document, but it can create a new one. I figured okay, Microsoft doesn't want to set it loose on the original, guess it makes sense that it requires a copy. So I said yes.
Nope. Instead of creating a copy of my document and editing it, it created an entirely new document which excised basically everything in the original report and replaced it with a very short summary - I'm talking 5000 words down to 500. All my tables and figures were gone, as was the standard report template my employer uses.
What utter garbage. Office productivity is a major use case for LLMs, and here the largest vendor of productivity software on the planet is happy to fuck it up.
The chatbot doesn't see the document structure; it sees tokens. When it generates a response, it's not editing; it's rewriting from scratch. Without a mechanism capable of precise diff/patch operations (like Cursor attempts with code), an LLM will always be a destructive tool for complex documents. Microsoft marketed this as an editor, but in reality, it's a summary generator
Copilot tells me it can't edit my current document, but it can create a new one. I figured okay, Microsoft doesn't want to set it loose on the original, guess it makes sense that it requires a copy. So I said yes.
Nope. Instead of creating a copy of my document and editing it, it created an entirely new document which excised basically everything in the original report and replaced it with a very short summary - I'm talking 5000 words down to 500. All my tables and figures were gone, as was the standard report template my employer uses.
What utter garbage. Office productivity is a major use case for LLMs, and here the largest vendor of productivity software on the planet is happy to fuck it up.