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Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by QuadrupleA on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:30AM (#35183238)
My first thought is, "gross"... now we'll have to wonder whether Manager X is even paying attention to the emails they're reading and responding to, or doing any actual work or thinking. Could lead to a world that's even more tilted towards politics and socially engineering your way up the ladder, versus competence and skill.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by redox99 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:34AM (#35183279)
On the other hand, maybe you prefer the decisions the AI takes for them instead of what they would do by themselves.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by aldarisbm on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:39AM (#35183358)
System prompt:

>>> You're a strict yet lenient manager, you have very high expectations from your reports, while making them feel like they are part of a bigger family. every email you write should reflect this.

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by xen2xen1 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @02:10PM (#35185881)
This doesn't actually sound like a joke.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by hudsonjr on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:38AM (#35183338)
That's kind of my concern as well. I feel like there is already a decline in thinking, but currently I can at least tell that it's the case.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by xattt on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:37AM (#35183314)
> Could lead to a world that's even more tilted towards politics and socially engineering your way up the ladder, versus competence and skill.

The skill and competence of the coming world will be in prompt-writing.

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by swader999 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:01PM (#35183721)
For a year or two maybe.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by droopyEyelids on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:41AM (#35183391)
ChatGPT opened my eyes to the fact that we already should have been wondering about it.

I tried using ChatGPT to generate answers to some requests to my team, and it created the most plausible wild goose chase answers I could ever imagine. They would be a terrible waste of time for anyone who received them.

Then I started to notice how many of the emails and requests I get are just as bad! Plausible sounding answers directing me to teams that don't exist, or telling me to read documentation that doesn't apply to the question I asked. Asking questions that seems specific but have fundamental contradictions that make them nonsense.

With people's limited knowledge and time and lack of attention and care we already live in the world of plausible bullshit hallucinated nonsense.

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by aldarisbm on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:45AM (#35183451)
This is why the grounding that office365 seems to be doing will be so important, it will not be 100% but having the response be grounded on actual artifacts (actual documentation, emails, data) will be huge, the fact that it gives you citations for the things it suggests, is huge.

Props to the MS team.

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by jeremyjh on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:22PM (#35184139)
The actual documentation and emails are like 80% bullshit though. This will just generate more plausible sounding bullshit than a completely naive AI. It would be nice if the thing helps me right excel formulas more conveniently though.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by agloe_dreams on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:44AM (#35183438)
> now we'll have to wonder whether Manager X is even paying attention to the emails they're reading and responding to, or doing any actual work or thinking

If my experience in engineering is anything to go by, this worry existed since the dawn of middle management. AI just makes it give good responses instead.

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by jacobolus on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:23PM (#35184153)
"BingBot, could you please write an email subtly undermining inter–team cohesion by hinting at gossipy shit-talk without mentioning it explicitly, and also praise my report in a way that demonstrates I don't know or appreciate what they've been doing for the past 2 years, calibrated to hurt their self-confidence without quite causing them to quit?"
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by davio on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:31PM (#35184297)
That's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by KyeRussell on Thursday March 16, 2023 @03:51PM (#35187423)
You are all presumably incredibly privileged tech workers that are free to find a better place to work instead of acting like this shit is inherent in a workplace, because it isn’t.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by antisthenes on Thursday March 16, 2023 @10:00PM (#35191909)
There's not enough "better places" for everyone.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by jimcsharp on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:26PM (#35184201)
Sounds good.

Cheers.

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by agloe_dreams on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:08PM (#35184897)
K. thanks
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by roseway4 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:45AM (#35183465)
Is it any better or worse than delegating work to a junior team member and not bothering to review the work product?

I love the idea that I can rapidly produce a rough draft of a document from notes, something I’m already doing with ChatGPT, albeit not as elegantly as if the functionality were integrated into Docs/Word.

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by reaperducer on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:28PM (#35184247)
Is it any better or worse than delegating work to a junior team member and not bothering to review the work product?

When a junior team member screws up the interpretation, there is someone to hold accountable.

With Office 365Bot, there is no accountability for errors.

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by robjan on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:00PM (#35184780)
In any sensible organisation the manager will be the accountable party regardless of whether the frontline staff are human or AI.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by sandworm101 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:46AM (#35183477)
Can one bring a sexual harassments complaint against a machine? I see this thing being trained up on material within an HR department only to parrot back some horrible phrase it learned after reading hundreds of harassment complaint discussions.

I used to work surrounded by lawyers. Just like doctors drift into discussions of horrible diseases, lawyer drift into discussions of horrible legal situations. Letting Clippy "learn" from that material seems really dangerous. How do you kill/reset this thing once it has become poisoned?

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by galaxytachyon on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:38PM (#35184415)
There are built in guardrails. Those are so strong it effectively lobotomized the LLM and force to abort its own internal process in favor of just saying: "I am sorry Hal, I afraid I can't do that".

Try to make ChatGPT or Bing to even attempt to write a snarky and negative email to your coworkers. It will refuse to do so.

Jailbreak attempts may work, but with how strong the guardrails are, it is unlikely you can consistently succeed. And any failed attemps can be report to sysadmins and forwarded to HR. Too much risk.

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by theGnuMe on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:34PM (#35185263)
The British figured out long ago how to insult someone with praise. This is why British comedy is so good. They have use such creative discourse to call out their politicians without libeling them as the liars they are.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by RandallBrown on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:58AM (#35183665)
You would just bring an HR complaint against the person that didn't proofread what the AI said.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by sandworm101 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:08PM (#35183857)
Isn't proofreading one of those low-hanging fruits, one of those those easy and mundane tasks at which AI excels?
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by massysett on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:30PM (#35184274)
If the green squiggles in Word are any indication, not at all. Maybe Microsoft has improved it lately?
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by xen2xen1 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:22PM (#35185099)
Not right now.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by roflyear on Thursday March 16, 2023 @11:56AM (#35183651)
They aren't today believe me!
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by costcofries on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:02PM (#35183732)
This will fundamentally change the way that M365 enables collaboration. I am truly fascinated by how quickly Microsoft is moving right now, it's really impressive. The moat on AI in enterprise continues to get bigger and bigger.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by peteradio on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:06PM (#35183815)
Congratulations, you have earned one Micro-buck.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by xen2xen1 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:37PM (#35185318)
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho approves, brought to you by Carl's Junior, and Brawndo, the thirst mutilatior.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by allenu on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:10PM (#35183885)
At least the yearly perf review at Microsoft is going to get easier since you just toss all your notes about what you did for the year to Copilot and have it write your summary. Your manager can do the same thing for their notes about you and compare.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by theGnuMe on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:36PM (#35185291)
Even better is if you use their apps you don't have to even make notes. It could just figure it out.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by wcoenen on Thursday March 16, 2023 @06:33PM (#35189816)
Speaking of notes, I noticed that OneNote is absent from the list of products that will get Copilot.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by Karawebnetwork on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:07PM (#35184887)
As a dev, I'm very much attracted to the ability to turn a Teams meeting transcript into a documentation page.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by xen2xen1 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:29PM (#35185180)
Ooh. I mean, ooo..
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by fintechjock on Thursday March 16, 2023 @01:54PM (#35185585)
I was thinking about this last night. The new AI tools are like performance enhancing drugs in sports. Especially in bodybuilding, there was a really painful transition from the world of non-PEDs to PEDs. They solved that by going to natural and non-natural competitions.

Other sports didn’t handle it so well (baseball, cycling, etc)

Just as people were asking “did Lance / Sammy / Barry / Arnold really do that incredible feat without juicing?” I think that we will now be asking “did Janice really write that blog post or was it GPT-4?”

Scary world

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by rychco on Thursday March 16, 2023 @02:48PM (#35186494)
PEDs do not make you a world class athlete, but you likely cannot be a world class athlete without some sort of PEDs. Much like PED use, top performers will take advantage of the new tools to widen the skill gap with their peers even further.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by strus on Thursday March 16, 2023 @03:30PM (#35187092)
EVERY professional athlete is juicing. Most of them just don't get caught.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by DoesntMatter22 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @08:06PM (#35190772)
Is Steph Curry juicing? If so how so? EPO? It's not going to make you shoot better.

All pro golfers?

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by strus on Tuesday March 28, 2023 @09:06AM (#35340360)
> It's not going to make you shoot better.

Nor do the muscles (from the point where you are strong enough so the ball can reach the basket), and yet you will not see a basketball players that is not muscular.

PEDs allow you to gain muscles faster and have greater stamina, all of which is beneficial.

> All pro golfers?

Of course I was talking mainly about sports where physical performance matters. Although PEDs exists even in e-sport (Adderall).

Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work by alach11 on Thursday March 16, 2023 @05:14PM (#35188753)
Maybe this is the beginning of the end of middle management? A large part of the work is keeping up with what your employees are doing, removing blockers, and maintaining alignment with other teams.

This makes it vastly easier to keep up with a larger number of reports, making flatter organizations easier to run.