Yes.-)
I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
341–346 of 346 posts
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two kinds of reliability: Machine reliability does the same thing the same way every time. If there's an error on some input, it will always make that error on that input, and somebody can investigate it and fix it, and then it will never make that error again. Human reliability does the job even when there are weird variances or things nobody bothered to check for. If the printer runs out of paper, the hum…
Or the human might take the printer out back with his buddies and smash it to bits ;)
Sometimes it's the only sane response.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not as black-and-white as "Brenda good, AI bad". It's much more nuanced than this. When it comes to (traditional) coding, for the most part, when I program a function to do X, every single time I run that function from now until the heat death of the sun, it will always produce Y. Forever! When it does, we understand why, and when it doesn't, we also can understand why it didn't! When I use AI to perform X, ever…
> When I use AI to perform X, every single time I run that AI from now until the heat death of the sun it will maybe produce Y. Forever! When it does, we don't understand why, and when it doesn't, we also don't understand why! To make this even worse, it may even produce Y just enough times to make it seem reliable and then it is unleashed without supervision, running thousands or millions of times, wrecking havoc pr…
> To make this even worse, it may even produce Y just enough times to make it seem reliable and then it is unleashed without supervision, running thousands or millions of times, wrecking havoc producing Z in a large number of places.
Reminds me of the famous Xerox scanning bug: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you spend these 2 minutes to check if a transcript is correct
Checking if a transcript is correct takes massively less time than typing one out in the first place. Especially since typing a transcript still involves checking that you got it right!
[deleted]
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#345Many fears of “AI mucking it up” could be mitigated with an ability to connect a workbook to a git repository. Not for data, but for VBA, cell formulas, and cell metadata. When you can encapsulate the changes a contributor (in this case co-pilot) makes into a commit, you can more easily understand what changes it/they made.
Even if "teaching the rest of the workforce how to use Git" wasn't a massive obstacle, many (most?) corporate workflows involve editing files that weren't designed to be human-readable. There are a couple of approaches out there for comparing diffs to excel spreadsheets specifically, but it's not exactly pleasant.
Considering that Microsoft perfected change control in the legal industry (ms word’s track changes), something can be done to add a degree of change control to spreadsheets.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#346Being a copilot for Excel is an extremely challenging task. I've read many papers on this subject and feel that current technology is still far from achieving 90% or higher accuracy. If you frequently use ChatGPT to analyze Excel, I believe you also often encounter situations where it fails or makes mistakes, and this feature of ChatGPT (Code Interpreter) has been out for over two years now. Of course, ChatGPT is quite naive when handling Excel; it doesn't even bother to analyze how many tables are actually in a sheet, always foolishly treating each sheet as a single table.