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I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

simonwillison.net

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Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#61

Post by Esophagus4 »

RegW wrote: post #53
Esophagus4 wrote: post #25

Hmmm the Brendas I know look a little different. “There are two Brendas - their job is to make spreadsheets in the Finance department. Well, not quite - they add the months and categories to empty spreadsheets, then they ask the other departments to fill in their sales numbers every month so it can be presented to management. “The two Brendas don’t seem to talk, otherwise they would realize that they’re both asking e…

> But that’s not what Brenda was hired for. Are you suggesting that Brenda should stay in her box?

No, I’m suggesting that she is ineffective exactly because she stays in her box.

She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.”

NOT to be confused with the junior engineer who comes into a project and says it’s garbage and suggests we rewrite it from scratch in ${hotLanguage} because they saw it on a blog somewhere.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#62

Post by anon721656321 »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…

The issue is reliability.

would you be willing to guarantee that some automation process will never mess up, and if/when it does, compensate the user with cash.

For a compiler, with a given set of test suites, the answer is generally yes, and you could probably find someone willing to insure you for a significant amount of money, that a compilation bug will not screw up in a such a large way that it will affect your business.

For a LLM, I have a believing that anyone will be willing to provide that same level of insurance.

If a LLM company said "hey use our product, it works 100% of the time, and if it does fuck up, we will pay up to a million dollars in losses" I bet a lot of people would be willing to use it. I do not believe any sane company will make that guarantee at this point, outside of extremely narrow cases with lots of guardrails.

That's why a lot of ai tools are consumer/dev tools, because if they fuck up, (which they will) the losses are minimal.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#63

Post by srean »

2dvisio wrote: post #32
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transcription is arguably one of the must useful enterprise AI tools avaliable. But i sure as heck wouldn't trust the cloud with it.

Still find the Copilot transcripts orders of magnitude worse than something like Wispr Flow and they tend to allucinate constantly and do not adapt to a company's context (that Copilot has access too...). I am talking about acronyms of products / teams, names of people (even when they are in the call), etc.

Can anyone familiar with the technical details shed light on why this is so.

Is it because of a globally trained model (as opposed to trained[tweaked on] on context specific data) or because of using different classes of models.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#64

Post by tl »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #36

This is transparent nonsense. People are very very happy to introduce errors into excel spreadsheets without any help from AI. Financial statements are correct because of auditors who check the numbers. If you have a good audit process then errors get detected even if AI helped introduce them. If you aren't doing a good audit then I suspect nobody cares whether your financial statement is correct (anyone who did woul…

> If you have a good audit process then errors get detected even if AI helped introduce them. If you aren't doing a good audit then I suspect nobody cares whether your financial statement is correct (anyone who did would insist on an audit).

Volume matters. The single largest problem I run into: AI can generate slop faster than anyone can evaluate it.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#65

Post by amscanne »

candiddevmike wrote: post #57
Aeolun wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. No, no. We disavow AI because our great leaders inexplicably trust it more than Brenda.

I don't understand why generative AI gets a pass at constantly being wrong, but an average worker would be fired if they performed the same way. If a manager needed to constantly correct you or double check your work, you'd be out. Why are we lowering the bar for generative AI?

It’s much cheaper than Brenda (superficially, at least). I’m not sure a worker that costs a few dollars a day would be fired, especially given the occasional brilliance they exhibit.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#66

Post by mavhc »

adlpz wrote: post #22
donatj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little over two paragraphs. Seems like it would have been simpler just to... type it out?

Where's the fun in that? :D

We choose to automate these things, not because they are easy, but because they are an interesting problem to solve

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#67

Post by conductr »

Aeolun wrote: post #42
quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…

> We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. No, no. We disavow AI because our great leaders inexplicably trust it more than Brenda.

It’s not even greater trust. It’s just passive trust. The thing is, Brenda is her own QA department. Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. It doesn’t even fully understand the problem/question sometimes yet provides a smart definitive sounding answer. It’s like the doctor on The Simpson’s, if you can’t tell he’s a quack, you probably would follow his medical advice.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#68

Post by anon721656321 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #57
Aeolun wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. No, no. We disavow AI because our great leaders inexplicably trust it more than Brenda.

I don't understand why generative AI gets a pass at constantly being wrong, but an average worker would be fired if they performed the same way. If a manager needed to constantly correct you or double check your work, you'd be out. Why are we lowering the bar for generative AI?

If a worker could be right 50% of the time and get paid 1 cent to write a 5000 word essay on a random topic, and do it in less than 30 seconds.

Then I think managers would be fine hiring that worker for that rate as well.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#69

Post by onionisafruit »

chaps wrote: post #18
glimshe wrote: post #9

This reminds me of a friend whose company ran a daily perl script that committed every financial transaction of the day to a database. Without the script, the company could literally make no money irrespectively of sales because this database was one piece in a complex system for payment processor interoperability. The script ran in a machine located at the corner of a cubicle and only one employee had the admin pass…

An old colleague and friend used to print out a 30 page perl script he wrote to do almost exactly this in this scenario. A stapled copy could always be found on his dining room table.

Was the printed copy a backup system or casual reading?

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#70

Post by nashashmi »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…

By the same fascination, do computers become more complex to enhance people? or do people get more complex with the use of computers? Also, do computers allow people to become less skilled and inefficient? or do less skilled and inefficient people require the need for computers?

The vector of change is acceptable in one direction and disliked in another. People become greater versions of themselves with new tech. But people also get dumber and less involved because of new tech.

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