Microsoft Copilot shows AI increasingly appears like an unwanted party guest | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Copilot shows AI increasingly appears like an unwanted party guest

theregister.com

73 pointsrntn24 comments

They've been disrespecting consent for years now. There have been posts about it online. "No" turned into "maybe later" turned into "remind me in 3 days" and now, even when I do turn on the few features I like, I will get bombarded to turn them on [0]. Turns out my local library puts guests on a Debian based system with libreoffice. I'm sure the majority of people don't even notice but it probably reduced cost dramatically and is easier to lock down.

[0] teams has a new calendar that's actually better. But even after turning it on I still get pop-ups to enable it.

Remind me in 3 days is an awful feature

It's not a feature, it's an intentional bug

Looking at you, Duolingo. Turning off notifications in the app results in constant nagging afterwards. From a user perspective it completely defeats the point of the setting.

More and more my response to stuff from the Magnificent Seven is to opt out, opt out, opt out. The number of annoyances on Windows keeps going up. Even Annoyances.org seems to have given up.

If the software has to beg you with pop ups and notifications to install or enable something, chances are that it’s not in your best interests to use it, and you don’t want it. Otherwise you would have voluntarily sought it out.

For me, it’s gotten this way for updates, too. I no longer want your “update” because it is more likely than not going to 1. Make my existing software worse and 2. Come with features I don’t want. So I just won’t upgrade/update.

Software companies can beg and plead and try to force this shit down my throat but I will just say no, no, no. They cannot be trusted and are reaping what they have sown.

Click upgrade -> previously free features now paywalled.

Far too common.

In our company we have Microsoft "adoption" consultants slapping us with reports about irrelevant features. Like "Last month only 12% of your users used the @mention in outlook!! Launch a communication campaign!".

It's so ridiculous. They're a vendor FFS. They work for us. Besides, I decide how I use my computer. This BS drives me crazy especially because I'm one of the people that has so work with these guys. Unfortunately one of our top dogs adores microsoft.

At least we decided against deploying copilot.

>At least we decided against deploying copilot.

There's still time...

Yes but the decision was pretty final at least for the next 2 years. Eventually they'll probably get it I agree yes. Especially if the price is dropped. That was really the main barrier.

> If the software has to beg you with pop ups and notifications to install or enable something, chances are that it’s not in your best interests to use it, and you don’t want it. Otherwise you would have voluntarily sought it out.

I feel strongly that thinking applies to everything in life, so I have removed all advertising from my life. Adblock on the web, no TV, no radio, no magazines, no newspapers.

When I genuinely need something I go buy it. Everything else I don’t care about.

When civilians like myself say that AI feels enormously overhyped, this is just one part of what we experience that fuels this cynical outlook. If AI was so great, it would sell on its own merits, and companies (not just Microsoft) wouldn't have to jam it in everywhere, making it an opt-out nightmare.

This article talks about Visual Studio, but Copilot is running amok across Office 365 too. Outlook now blocks screen real estate with a message begging you to use "AI Coach" to "check" your email, and Word, PowerPoint and Excel all have Copilot buttons everywhere, with automatic PowerPoint "summaries", even though I'm the sole author.

They will stop at nothing to steal and spy on what you’re doing to train the models on free data. The models need more data that isn’t copyright. By using windows you consent to … blah blah blah.

What we need is a huge server farm running copilot doing nothing but watching gay porn

>What we need is a huge server farm running copilot doing nothing but watching gay porn

This made me cackle. We definitely need to start fucking with AI’s training data. Maybe we poison it so that during odd-numbered hour’s it’s anarchocapitalist and during even-numbered hours it’s hardcore Marxist.

VSCode's UI has a lot of distractions. Even if you use AI for other things, I can see the appeal of wanting to disable Copilot.

For me coding is the one place where I actually see value in Copilot.

> Uninstalling Windows Copilot now requires using PowerShell and then preventing reinstallation via AppLocker, according to Microsoft documentation.

You don’t hate Microsoft enough.

Off -prem AI is just publishing proprietary or private data with extra steps. If it can’t be done on-prem with a model I can download, I’m not going to hook it into any of my workflows. Period .

Fortunately, on-prem models with agents bolted on are good enough for most things. For the rest I’ll just cut and paste into the web interface on off premises services. That way I know what I’m sharing.

Clippy 2.0?

now with full neckbeard and wacky tab completions with up to 6 characters correctly guessed per if statement

"It might have something to do with the billions these super-corporations have sunk into the technology."

"Appears like" is not correct. You could say "looks like," but that's not the title of this article.

Could mean "appear" as in "show up"

appears, like

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