Testing Microsoft’s Copilot Ads ⇥ theverge.com

Microsoft, like a lot of tech companies, sincerely believes we want to have conversations with our computers. It makes ads showing how Copilot can answer questions based on what is visible onscreen and with apparent knowledge of a user’s personal context.

Or can it?

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, the Verge:

I spent a week with Copilot, asking it the same questions Microsoft has in its ads, and tried to get help with tasks I’d find useful. And time after time, Copilot got things wrong, made stuff up, and spoke to me like I was a child.

There are excuses people make up for artificial intelligence features — ways to explain away its inconsistencies and unreliability. None of those need to be invoked here. This is a major corporation orientating its entire strategy around features that simply do not work as advertised.