Beneath Microsoft's Surface event, AI spreads everywhere Microsoft on Thursday further co-opted its GitHub subsidiary's Copilot brand and heralded the arrival of its own Microsoft Copilot as "your everyday AI companion." Borrowing Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's robot tagline, "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With," perhaps would have been too much of an intellectual property risk …
Until AI achieves sentience it's just another bunch of algorithms. Right now it can't drive a car. It can't tell fact from fiction. It can't write anything original. It can't reliably recognise a face. It's just the latest buzzword being used to hoodwink people into buying stuff...
> Until AI achieves sentience it's just another bunch of algorithms
Hate to break it to you, but even if it does achieve sentience, it will still be just another bunch of algorithms. So long as it runs on hardware, it is all just algorithms, right down to the microcode.
PS
Whether or not you wish to take that as some meaningful statement about what sentience is or "proof" that AI can never be sentient (or, conversely, that it can be, but...) is entirely up to you: you can pick and choose your own philosophy and even your own sophistry.
But like, religion and politics, a gentlebeing never discusses philosophy of AI in public or over the dinner table.
It's not intelligent. It's got memory and learning capabilities chained to a giant pile of dice to roll.
People outside the marketing department need to stop supporting and repeating all this AI crap until there are some of the essential features of intelligence. Not even arm wavy "GENERAL" AI, just some basic animal level intelligence.
This fake AI is a another bad marketing term to sell defective shit that can't live up to the hype. Unless they get slapped down, this will be like the NFT craze that just crashed. That lasted a decade. We have barely shaken the shit off out shoes from the IoT craze and "Smart" everything which just means a bad version of whatever you have that will stop working when the wifi burps, but with extra spyware and a built in ad server.
Screw these idiots and the snake oil they are trying to sell.
(I hold back my vitriol for those making useful tools that actually do something, GANs are not going away anytime soon, they just aren't intelligent.)
Just like search and so on
All this "AI" predictive search and completion is utter bollocks
You start typing the suggest have absolutely sod all relevance to what you put in. Even with s specific phrase it is suggesting utter shite to complete it.
Just turn all this crap off and save all the memory, cpu and electricity,
* Can't drive a car - that seems to be 50% of people on the roads today
* Can't tell fact from fiction - US polls indicate that's more than 50% of the population
* Can't write anything original - anyone seen any good films recently?
* Can't reliably recognise a face - we all know that feeling...
Joking aside, if you stop going off on one about whether AI is true intelligence or not, the bottom line is that it's already providing some bloody useful tools, which can be used and/or abused. As with most technological advances: you can run, but you can't hide (forever).
Basing its enquiries on the most common forms of questions posed to shoppers that it finds in its training set, whilst trying to influence people to shop responsibly:
Only the earrings and not the full set? Do you WANT people to think you're cheap?
Brynylon and socks with sandals? Are you TRYING to give me a heart attack?
Oh, Lordy, what did we say about carbs? Mmm mmm mmmmmmmm, you did NOT just put that in your basket!
If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
The point is to sell you more Microsoft services.
All I want is an off switch. A No Thanks option.
What also annoys me on this is the power required. It is going to be eating up my electric bill faffing around with my data, reading and collating my data and offering advice I don't want. (See also Clippy).
Multiple this wasted power by millions of computers - how much CO2 we wasting? What is the cost of this unwanted processing to people?
I also have a computer full of client data, client docs, and their details. This AI will not know the difference between their stuff and my stuff and will just spout all kinds of confused rubbish at me.
No thanks. An off switch please.
I am certainly starting to mess with Linux more... but somethings it just can't do. Or you have to get far to geeky to solve a simple task. I am actively trying to move due to situations like this.
It is also hard to get my clients to move, so I need to find the solutions for them as well as me.
I beg to differ, Sir.... Canonical are no angels, but they are not even a tiny fraction as bad as Microsoft.
Perhaps they would become as bad if they got their hands on a monopoly but a bit of unsolicited telemetry and an ill-judged attempt at bundling Amazon ads into their OS pales into insignificance when compared to Microsoft's crimes against technology.
I predict that there are some secret registry hack or worse, a PowerShell incantation that will disable this only for the next 'Patch Tuesday' event to change the keys. Just to make it hard you know.
I am just so happy that I gave MS the finger in 2016. They really are fiddling while rome burns.
I'd love to see the evidence that demonstrates that customers have demanded this [cough][cough] feature.
"No thanks. An off switch please."
No such animal in Windows. Asking Microsoft to turn something off they deliberately turned on isn't going to work. Your data is too profitable and they are a corporation that needs more money this year than last year or they get fired.
I've been shifting over to Linux for the last three years and I'm almost there. Once my gaming is sorted, I'm gone and MS can do whatever the f*** they want without me.
"The point is to sell you more Microsoft services."
Exactly! And if they succeed (highly debatable in this case as it's still a solution looking for a problem to solve), the next step will be to introduce a 'premium tier' licence and have some functionality only in that.
In reality the text processing parts alone are a huge, if incremental, step up from the syntax and grammar checker. The image, video, and sound processing will similarly be used and loved by many, but the news is on all of the awful things people have enthusiastically started using them for.
If the rest of us don't play catch up, the future will be filled with conservative protofascist hentai furry deepfake influencers selling SCOP and wellness scams. Remember that these things make more of what they ingest, and the morons that are training them are effectively making the models smell their own farts.
Watching this non-"event", I got the distinct impression that Microsoft will have to scrape all of your date (and file content) to allow Cipilot to work. If you haven't moved off of Windows and OneDrive, especially Windows 11 by now, do it before 26th September and the arrival of 23H2. Your privacy is in great danger.
I see it more like Mr. Roboto or maybe the opposite since Killroy was human...
The time has come at last - secret secret, I've got a secret
To throw away this mask - secret secret, I've got a secret
Now everyone can see - secret secret, I've got a secret
My true identity...
I'm Clipp-AI! Clipp-AI! Clipp-AI! Clipp-AI!
We've had similar assistants in desktop OS for years and nobody uses them.
This is slightly different but will it matter? It'll probably generate dubious content but that can easily be done already by opening a browser window
Typical Microsoft approach - no vision whatsoever. Throw in the latest crap just to be first, and hope someone likes it.
What most people want from a desktop OS is pretty simple. Good windowing and task management, high efficiency with great battery life. Seamless updates. Respect user preferences and keep data secure.
Good news though, Fedora 39 is out next month.
It is.... ghastly....
Personally I have a loathing of machines which try to speak and a very strong aversion to talking to them as well.
It's alright bad enough with all these voice activated "personal assistants" which misunderstand half your instructions, and sat navs (not forgetting the option of those oh-so-funny novelty/celebrity voices).
Am I imagining it or didn't they pre-install Cortana for a while, which immediately began "speaking" to you on a fresh install?
I hate it all - it's truly ghastly and Adams was spot on about Genuine People Personalities! I turn off all voice recognition and speech synthesis on all my devices as I can't stand it.
I'm not about to start text chatting with GPT either and the last thing I want is for it to be ingesting everything I'm doing and passing comment on it.
It's ironic that this article quotes Sirius Cybernetics because although Douglas Adams probably wrote about this too early for it to be aimed at Microsoft, I always think immediately of Microsoft every time I hear the name "Sirius Cybernetics" as they're the kind of mindless jerks who should be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
I also turn off all voice recognition and artificial speech on all devices. I think Douglas Adams very much had the Microsoft/IBM duo in mind when dreaming up Sirius Cybernetics. He was a big Apple fan, this was back in the time when Apple was decent company with the Woz at the helm. I think he would probably have changed his mind on Apple if he saw what they are now.
This is just the beginning. There needs to be an agent running in Windows to put a pretty face on all the back end complexity that is coming. I've been trying to grapple with the complexities and requirements of CoPilot and wait until organizations realize they may have to rearchitect their file systems and security architectures just to ask it a simple question. This is just the "hey, look over here" phase. The decade of work to make this whole thing viable begins soon and it will be dark and very hard work for most organizations. And, it will throw in an occasional ( or more often) completely bat sh*t crazy answer or recommendation. But, hey, think of all that training and consulting revenue.
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