Microsoft
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2023–2026
10:48 · 893K views · Mar 16, 2023
Microsoft's March 2023 launch highlights for Microsoft 365 Copilot, showing AI features in Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. The demo includes using it to draft a graduation party speech.
Mostly cited critically, as an example of AI being used for personal moments in ways commenters found dystopian.
3 comments from Hacker News
That's an interesting interview, thanks for sharing. Though I draw the line with using these tools at helping me out with the drudgery of daily work. I don't want them to impersonate me, or write emails on my behalf. I cringe whenever Gmail suggests the next phrase it thinks I want to write. It's akin to someone trying to end your sentences for you. Stop putting words in my mouth! The recent Microsoft 365 Copilot presentation, where the host had it ghost write a speech for their kid's graduation party[1]—complete with cues about where to look and laugh(!)—is unbelievably cringey. Do these people really think AI should be assisting with such personal matters? Do they really find doing these things themselves a chore? > And I have no idea why things are like this. Oh, I think it's pretty clear. The amount of resources required to run this on personal machines is still prohibitively high. I saw in one of your posts you mentioned you use 8xA100s. That's a crazy amount of compute unreachable by most people, not to mention the disk space it requires. Once the resource requirements are lowered, and our personal devices are _much_ more powerful, then self-hosting would be feasible. Another, perhaps larger, reason, is that AI tools are still a business advantage for companies, so it's no wonder that they want to keep them to themselves. I think this will change and open source LLMs will be widespread in a few years, but proprietary services will still be more popular. And lastly, most
> Do you really respect your recipients so little that you can't be bothered to share your own thoughts? > I might as well get an AI to call my own mother on mother's day. One of the first copilot adverts I saw had a woman using it to write a speech for her daughters graduation, with speaker prompts instructing the woman to look at her daughter at one point in the speech. Such a personal and important moment in both their lives, I was shocked that they even put it out and thought it was OK. What next? "Too busy negotiating a critical business deal to attend the birth of your first child? Have copilot attend and email you a summary of it later." Found the video: this video
I remember in the "microsoft office <> Generative AI" demo, one of the motivating examples was a parent generating a graduation party speech for her child... [1] The first half of the video is demonstrating how the parent can take something as special as a party celebrating a major milestone and automate it into a soulless box-check – while editing some segments to make it look like their own voice. Definite black mirror vibes. [1]: this video