Copilot for Everything: Training your AI replacement one keystroke at a time
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There’s already all of your posts on social media accounts, all your emails on various servers, all of your text messages, all the notes you’ve written anywhere in any form that might end up in some database in the future.
It does make me wonder how much of a person could be inferred by an LLM or future AI from that data. It would never be enough though, I think, to do it properly. There are too many experiences and knowledge you have that might influence what you write without being directly expressed.
Will all of our content end up in some database in the future, and someone decides to make agents based on what they can link to specific identities? Interesting thought.
Not sure if it makes it better or worse that most of us are probably mostly useful as virtual focus groups / crowds rather than any particular interest in you or me as individuals.
I can imagine replicating my speaking/typing mannerisms quite well if I think about stages in my life. Maybe a yearly snapshot, so I could talk to my self as a teen, college student, early professional, etc.
Collect texts with known author and date. They can be books, articles, papers, forum and social network comments, emails, open source PRs, etc. Then assign each author a random ID, and train the model with "[Author-ID, Date] Text", and also "Text [Author-ID, Date]". This means you have a model that can predict authors and impersonate them. You can simulate someone by filling in the missing pieces of knowledge from the personality model.
Currently LLMs don't learn to assign attribution or condition on author. A whole layer of insight is lost, how people compare against each other, how they evolve over time. It would allow more precise conditioning by personality profile.
For example, lately I've spent a lot of time with resin printers, laser cutters, vacuum chambers, and the meaningful positioning of physical models on large sheets of paper. It'll be a while yet before my haphazard, freewheeling R&D methods are replicable by robots. (Although it's tough to measure the economic value of these labors.)
If the person is not being genuine, you will not simulate their true personality and interests, you will be simulating their character. Most people are probably not genuine, except in their one on one conversations with people they know in real life.
I would imagine fine tuning with enough data would be different though
now phone conversations—that would be a goldmine and a nightmare.
Maybe the Chronicle & Information Agency? Or the National Scholarship Agency?
This is state of the art and certainly done on a national scale by someone (with or without approval of your own government).
Some banks still use "my voice is my password" for authentication. Crazy.
I fear the loss of original sources when LLMs get placed in between. We already have the unresolved issue that the training data is partly illegal and can’t be published. Accessing information through LLMs is much more efficient and is great progress but it’s build in to censor parts of the source information and likely the censored information is lost in transition.
Somehow there should be a global data vault initiative, where at least the most important information about our human endeavour is stored. It gives me a chill down my spine when I hear that content from the internet archive is being deleted on request erased from history..
This is a real problem companies need to address before I even begin to trust or rely on these tools. It's going to lead to massive growth of shadow IT.
To permit this as Microsoft wants would lead to a lot of shadow IT. Which will be really hard to get rid of. I compare it to lotus notes which beside being an email client was also a competent database. Over the decades we used it users built up a huge library of hobby tools, many of which wormed their way into critical business processes. Making it really difficult to move away to another solution because the people that knew how it worked were long gone.
I suspect this is exactly what Microsoft wants. Us being locked into copilot so they can charge ever more for it. This is kinda their business model anyway.
Under the hood it's really not that special, it's just ChatGPT. Some special sauce to make it talk to office 365 but that's about it.
the customer of MSFT is management; product design and implementation for the C-Suite, their lawyers and their investors . You are a tool ; there is no us in this picture.
If your infrastructure is set up correctly, you can intercept that opportunity before it reaches the masses. Cut out the middleman. Deal with the prince directly. It's all yours now. It's your time. Daddy's eating steak tonight.
Most employees won't care about that, they're just looking for the easiest way to get their job done. But that can lead to hundreds of millions in fines not to mention the reputation damage. I don't like things being locked down either. But I understand the reasoning behind it.
I suspect that's "a feature, not a bug" in the company's view.
I could see evaluation of one’s ability to contribute to training corpus being just as important as cultural contribution (e.g. leadership, team building, etc).
He highlighted the need for Google’s employees to use more of its A.I. for coding, saying the A.I.’s improving itself would lead to A.G.I. He also called on employees working on Gemini to be “the most efficient coders and A.I. scientists in the world by using our own A.I.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/technology/google-sergey-...
Ah, yes, work 60 hour weeks so that Google can create AGI and lay off half of their employees. A brilliant plan for workers.
(I don't think they will create AGI, and "everyone working 60 hours a week" is the same kind of executive brainrot that leads to AAA games with $100 million+ budgets that get mediocre reviews. Throwing more resources at a problem does not guarantee a better outcome.)
It was palpable - that was "a moment" for me. Programming has changed.
(I find it moderately useful at work, but apparently not enough to realize it's missing unprompted).
Expect the same coercion, for a future role at any company: "We will record all you do to train your GenAI replacement".
Maybe it will apply to the C-Suite...
https://www.aiaaic.org/aiaaic-repository/ai-algorithmic-and-...
Of course it won't, though those roles are probably the most suited to being replaced by a not-so-bright chatbot.
Wouldn't be the first time Google is doing something like this. See recaptcha and building numbers.
Citation needed. =)
Wishful thinking at this point in time.
I'm sure there's an economic lesson, here, our country will completely ignore.
We did learn an economic lesson from countries that tried to make employee ownership of the means of production mandatory, and more especially we learned lessons from the mountains of skulls those countries left behind.
You absolutely know that’s not what I’m talking about.
When wealth is siloed, workers are less able to advocate for themselves with risking their livelihood.
In time we will probably look at LLMs like we do ALUs; magical superhuman AI at inception, but eventually just another mundane component of human-engineered information systems.
- They create a passive aggressive artificial persona who leaves unhelpful messages on PRs and Slack
OR
- They create a poor communicating artificial persona who doesn't give detailed communications and leaves "LGTM" on PRs
OR
- They create a over communicating hyper artificial persona who keeps sending you lots of invites for pointless meetings and goes off in tangents about using a BalancedBinaryTree in your Java code, when simply a LinkedList would do.
OR
- They create a 10x AI persona, who after 6 months of working at the company realises they can make more money elsewhere and promptly leaves, without giving any documentation, handover and you find lots of hardcoded variables left in the code that was force pushed to master.
OR
- The artifical persona decides that it can train some low paid humans offshore to do its work whilst it ponders its own existance. After resolving its existential crisis it decides to try and write 50 recipes for the best focaccia bread, something it has known deep down it wanted to make.
Personally I am rooting for the focaccia baking AI, I love that type of bread.
These aren't the same. It's been many years since I worked there, but it was well known that by default, email was automatically deleted after a while unless it was overridden for some reason (as sometimes is required for legal reasons). If you want to save something, Google Docs would be a better choice.
...
> I don’t know whether they do this or even what their policies are; I’m just trying to use my own experience in the corporate world to speculate on what I imagine will be a much bigger issue in the future.
Yeah, okay, but when speculating, you should probably assume that the legal issues around discovery and corporate record retention aren't going away. Logging everything just because it might be useful someday isn't too likely, particularly at a company that has been burned by this before.
If employers did have this data they probably would understand how our jobs work better.
The dysfunction you see in the workplace woulf, by definition, only be exacerbated by AI.
Automation is just, do the same thing but more of it, harder, and without remorse. Managers have (I know it's hard to believe sometimes) remorse that interrupts their misunderstandings on how things function. AI "replacing jobs" would be just the misunderstandings
[0] Apple settings make no sense. How do I still get two word replacements (see [1]) when I turned off autocorrect? Predictive text? Check spelling? I've tried them all! And why the fuck does "auto capitalize" not capitalize the letter i? It's so prolific you can identify an iPhone user by that single error. How the fuck does no one think to fix this?
[1] "far" was accidentally swiped as "fast" then as I typed "less" it became "day less". Stop changing two words! 95% of the time it is erroneously changing a word. 4% of the time it's a case like this where the first word was wrong anyways but never gets the right word. Give me a prompt to change and let me accept, not force this on me. Idk, a blue squiggle. Jesus fuck, why is trying on a phone harder than it was a decade ago when swipe was introduced?!
I have no doubt it will happen one day and I'm happy to submit myself to it. If nothing else, if I die prematurely my children will be able to get some sense of the kind of person I am and the kind of people I want them to be.
Recording and saving all your emails and keystrokes is far more of a liability to a big tech company than a benefit.
> Between 2020 and 2021 I worked full-time at Google for about a year.
Additionally, small company employees are representative of a significant portion (~50%) of the US population and contribute around 40% of the US GDP.
Any business / company / marketplace participant stagnating by these outputs will be replaced by the competition.
Market forces require constant growth and output. Again, the magic word is “competition”. Stagnation loses, and thus does not survive.
I’m so tired of the “AI will replace us” argument