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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

#151

Post by watwut »

stavros wrote: post #123
elevatortrim wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No contradiction here: When we say “machine”, we mean deterministic algorithms and predictable mechanisms. Generative AI is neither of those things (in theory it is deterministic but not for any practical applications). If we order by predictability: Quick Sort > Brenda > Gen AI

If you think programs are predictable, I have a bridge to sell you. The only relevant metric here is how often each thing makes mistakes. Programs are the most reliable, though far from 100%, humans are much less than that, and LLMs are around the level of humans, depending on the humans and the LLM.

When human makes a mistake, we call it a mistake. When human lies, we call it a lie. In both cases, we blame the human.

When LLM does the same, we call it hallucination and blame the human.

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

#152

Post by thisisit »

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.

I don't think that is the message here. The message is that while Brenda might know what she is doing and maybe AI helps her.

> She's gonna birth that formula for a financial report and then she's gonna send that financial report

The problem is people who might not know what they are doing

> he would have sent it back to Brenda but he's like oh I have AI and AI is probably like smarter than Brenda and then the AI is gonna fuck it up real bad

Because AI outputs sound so confident it makes even the layman feel like an expert. Rather than involve Brenda to debug the issue, C-suite might say - I believe! I can do it too. AI FTW!

Even when people advocate automation especially in areas like finance there is always a human in the loop whose job is to double check the automation. The day when this human finds errors in the machine there is going to be lot of noise. And if the day happens to be a quarterly or yearly closing/reporting there is going to be hell to pay once closing/reporting is done. Both the automation and developer are going to be hauled up (obviously I am exaggerating here).

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

#153

Post by dr-detroit »

cryptonym wrote: post #141
anon721656321 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

5000 half-right words is worthless output. That can even lead to negative productivity.

[dead]

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

#155

Post by kjkjadksj »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #23
Dumblydorr wrote: post #17

Co-pilot and AI has been shoved at the Microsoft Stack in my org for months. Most of the features were disabled or hopelessly bad. It’s cheaper for Microsoft to push this junk and claim they’re doing something, it’s going to improve their stock far more than not doing it, even though it’s basically useless currently. Another issue is that my org disallows AI transcription bots. It’s a legit security risk if you have…

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

It is notoriously unreliable

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

#156

Post by sionisrecur »

simonw wrote: post #6

This quote is pulled from a TikTok, I recommend watching the whole thing here: https://www.tiktok.com/@belligerentbarbies/video/75683800086... (I pulled the quote by using yt-dlp to grab the MP4 and then running that through MacWhisper to generate a transcript.)

You... could have given the job to Brenda instead, unless the irony was the point?

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

#157

Post by simonw »

sionisrecur wrote: post #156
simonw wrote: post #6

This quote is pulled from a TikTok, I recommend watching the whole thing here: https://www.tiktok.com/@belligerentbarbies/video/75683800086... (I pulled the quote by using yt-dlp to grab the MP4 and then running that through MacWhisper to generate a transcript.)

You... could have given the job to Brenda instead, unless the irony was the point?

The global economy isn't going to crash if I make a mistake with the transcript.

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

#158

Post by daveguy »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #59
oytis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you end up with a team of five people each tree times as expensive as Brenda, and what used to be an email now takes a sprint and has to go through ticket system.

That’s not what I had in mind. Then you end up with a report that goes out automatically every month to leadership pulled directly from the Salesforce data, along with a real time dashboard anyone in the org can look at, broken down by team, vertical, and sales volume. Why are people so attached to manual process?

It's not what you had in mind, but that's what you get. Because automation, integration, and AI are currently garbage -- Salesforce, Netsuite, doesn't matter. They don't do the magic that they promise. Because process is still very much a human problem, not a computational one.

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

#159

Post by pjmlp »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #17

Co-pilot and AI has been shoved at the Microsoft Stack in my org for months. Most of the features were disabled or hopelessly bad. It’s cheaper for Microsoft to push this junk and claim they’re doing something, it’s going to improve their stock far more than not doing it, even though it’s basically useless currently. Another issue is that my org disallows AI transcription bots. It’s a legit security risk if you have…

The worse part is to see it creep on developer stack at places where it should not be.

I am all good for nice completion on VS, or help decypher compiler errors, but lets do this AI push with some contention.

Also what I really deslike is the prompt interface, AI integrations have to feel natural transparent part of the workflow, not trying to put everything into a tiny chat window.

And while we're at it, can we please improve voice reckognition?

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

#160

Post by daveguy »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #61
RegW wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It may not be what you meant to say, but it's exactly what you are saying where ${hotLanguage} is the latest automation platform or AI gimmick.
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