Ugh, thought this could’ve referred to a Trial as in “All rise for the judge”, not Trial as in “Your free trial has expired”.
We’re way overdue to put AIs on former trials.
I mean… it’s software. It’s only as good as you leverage it.
I don’t see where a government would need a chatbot. Anyways, chances are that half the staff was already using some form of LLM before this trial.
Why wouldn’t they want one? If it’s a tool their employees want, they should provide it.
The point is that this is all happening in a cloud. One that is probably located in the US. Not a good thing for a non-US government to send potentially confidential or even secret data to.
It doesn’t have to, you can run LLMs locally. We do at my org, and we only have a few dozen people using it, and it’s running on relatively modest hardware (Mac Mini for smaller models, Mac Studio for larger models).
Yeah… You do it, but do you think the UK government does?
My point is they could if they were concerned about data leaks.
Yeah, no shit. But they nearly doubled the price. I canceled my membership, but I doubt enough did to actually matter.
I was fine paying $60 a year for Office. I was never gonna use the AI stuff. When they said it was $100, I bailed. So now they don’t get the $60. But enough people will go on paying that they will actually make more money on Office in the next year, not less.
Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets or even their feet to effect any meaningful change. At least not when it comes to their tech toys.
I have been using Libre office for a while now and it’s superior to office in every way.
Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets
That and most governments are wrapped up in Windows, and therefore kinda just captive to the insane pricing. I get everything I need out of LibreOffice, personally.
The sole reason I still pay the Microsoft tax is Excel. Other office suite components are generally good enough to fill in for their Microsoft counterparts. But, spreadsheet programs are one area where open source competitors need to get their shit together.
Most of them can do the basics but Excel is still in a class by itself for power users and advanced functionality. That’s a real bummer because I would love to stop paying the Microsoft tax.
I’m no dev, but would you consider writing up in detail the features/behaviour you’re missing on libreoffice issue tracker?
I love that the only AI goal the oligarchy can focus on is making sure we can all use it to work more.
If you can be in three meetings at once with AI then every single one of those meetings could have been an email
Or a group chat
There’s meetings other people need to have and I just need to know broadly what was said. Transcription and summerizing would be great for that
That is, if I could trust its accuracy. Which I don’t.
So a followup email with meeting minutes written by someone actually there…
GenZ thinks they invented interns lol
She looks happy too!
I believe that’s the “I spent six years in college and $150,000 for the ‘privilege’ of sitting in teams meetings all day.” look.
I like to imagine we are witnessing malicious compliance from the model.
I mean basically. Call me a paranoid communist but given half the chance they’d fucking bring back slavery.
I think we are there, just under the name of capitalism vs slavery.
that’s pretty much where we are now
shit minimum wage, corporations owning housing, and monopolies in pretty much every market. it’s just slavery with the illusion of freedom because you can choose which shitty apartment building to live in for over half your income, and which franchise stores you shop at, while your essentials are getting price gouged and constantly worse quality for higher cost, yet the workers don’t make more
that’s just slavery with extra steps
There are bad things in communism - a reductionist model advertised as fitting for everything (a bit similar to Unix, that), and there are good things in communism - attention to balance of power. Revolutionary ideologies generally have advice for situations warranting a revolution more fleshed out.
If you think communism is reductionist, then you might need to read more theory…
Just saying, ending comments with “…” doesn’t make them look smarter.
Which specifically, accepted by most communists, should I read? Will that something allow a model different than that of classes and formations and dialectic materialism? If not, then it is reductionist.
Just saying, ending comments with “…” doesn’t make them look smarter.
You seem mad…
That “…” again. I am.
Hmmm… Perhaps it was intentional…
I mean, I would describe myself as more of an anarchist: I don’t trust the state or capitalism. When I said “Call me a Paranoid Communist” I was referring to the fact that capitalism is gonna fuck us.
OK, then - no, not capitalism. Expectation of truth will fuck us. All the stabilizers of the humanity were built reliant on that - if it looks like a duck and so on. It doesn’t work anymore. Can’t blame something on capitalism if with other things equal the change affects capitalist and socialist systems similarly.
Also a new world war seemed like something slowly rolling, with tanks and cargo ships and propaganda speeches.
What people don’t understand is the sheer scale and precision of operations available today. You can prepare for 50 years something that will take 30 seconds, and then we will all have a different world.
I think honestly the Internet is just that - a very slow trap for the rest of the world, being sprung by some parties associated with US military/deep-state/whatever first, and then being continued by Silicon Valley powers that be, only with their own dreams for it.
No shit ‐ the AI bubble provides no value, but it is exciting for the c suite and governments.
Lots of LLM shills in these comments. I hope your work doesn’t value reality/accuracy.
I use Copilot for generating images of concepts for presentations at work. It helps me get my point across and no accuracy is needed because it is taking the place of clip art and Google image searches. There is absolutely a place for Generative AI in the workplace. Whether it is worth the cost and whether people are trusting it too much is another question.
It helps me get there more often than not, anywhere from programming I’m unfamiliar with to brainstorming in graphic design. I see a lot of anti-AI folks diss it without considering how it’s actually used. It’s a tool like any other, and you get what you make of it.
Removed by mod
If they do, who would buy their stuff?
They really don’t think past the next quarter or two. And even if they did they aren’t lacking on new ways to exploit people.
Kinda want to send this to my company lol
According to the M365 Copilot monitoring dashboard made available in the trial, an average of 72 M365 Copilot actions were taken per user.
“Based on there being 63 working days during the pilot, this is an average of 1.14 M365 Copilot actions taken per user per day,” the study says. Word, Teams, and Outlook were the most used, and Loop and OneNote usage rates were described as “very low,” less than 1 percent and 3 percent per day, respectively.
Yeah that probably won’t have the intended effect…this basically just shows that AI assistants provide no benefit when they’re not used and nothing else.
People probably tried it, found out that it’s crap and stopped using it.
Its hardly possible to actually test it properly in relation to your work and changes in productivity with a single query per day. It
They probably did multiple queries per day at the beginning, found out it isn’t worth it and stopped using it …
Maybe, maybe not we actually have no idea as the article doesn’t mention it. Nevertheless, doing infrequent queries is an equally likely scenario, given that people are really bad at changing their habits and existing workflows regardless of potential benefits.
Thats complete speculation on your part though. It could equally be people hardly used it at first then started to use it more as they found ways it was helpful. Unless you see the data there’s no reason to say one or the other.
Ok but if it was actually useful, wouldn’t people actively engage with it?
Probably, my point was that you cant say if its increasing, decreasing or staying constant just from the number of times it’s been used. It could be that for most people its completely useless but for a small group its very usefull and they are using it more and more. Or as suggested it could be that everyone tried it a bit at first found it useless and stopped using it. Or that its kinda useful in very specific cases so it gets constantly used a tiny bit.
On my work, of I’m provided free software that makes my work easier, I’ll use it. If the users arent seeing the value, then the value is not there.
If the users arent seeing the value, then the value is not there.
Simply not true, if this was the case, then change management wouldn’t be a thing.
While I agree that people are resistant to change, all the studies ive seen show negative or minimal benefit.
So either people are being poorly trained by the change management or the product is poor and doesn’t love up to its marketing.
people are being poorly trained by the change management
Yes this happens a lot, and IT-habits are notoriously difficult to change in a work-setting.
change management wouldn’t be a thing.
What do you think Change Management is?
I’m not a programmer, so it’s got nothing to offer me. Mostly my job is to write documentation for propriety software and hardware, stuff the AI knows nothing about, not everyone in the world can mak use of AI, and it doesn’t require a PhD and 30 days of constant usage to work that out.
Then maybe it’s not useful for you. That doesn’t mean AI isn’t useful for a number of other roles.
I’m a software developer and find its code generation to be awful, but I also find that it’s great at looking up technical information. Maybe I’m looking for a library to accomplish a task, and I want to compare features. Or maybe I’m having trouble finding usage examples for a relatively niche library. Those are task the AI is great at, because it can look at tons of blog posts, stack overflow questions, etc, and generate me something reasonable that I can verify against official docs.
If my workflow was. mostly email and internal documentation, yeah, AI wouldn’t be that useful. If my workflow relies on existing documentation that’s perhaps a little hard to find or a bit poor, then AI is great. Find the right use case and it can save time.
Then maybe it’s not useful for you. That doesn’t mean AI isn’t useful for a number of other roles.
Case in point, as per the article, AI is pretty useless for regular office work
“Regular office work” is a pretty broad category. Yeah, it’s probably not useful in retrieving records for someone or processing forms, but it should be useful for anything that requires research.
I’m not saying AI specifically is useful, just that people in general tend to resist change in their work methods regardless of what they are.
I also work with a lot of proprietary knowledge, chemical and infrastructure in my case, and AI still can be useful when used properly. We use a local model and have provided it with all our internal docs and specs, and limited answers to knowledge from these, so we can search thousands of documents much faster, and it links to the sources for it’s answers.
Doesn’t do my job for me, but it sure as shit makes it easier to have a proper internal search engine that can access information inside documents and not just the titles.
You assume the average usage is representative of the actual usage. You averaged the actions over the time period, nothing’s says the users didn’t performed the averaged 72 actions within the first three days or any time restricted window within the whole period of time and got bored with it seeing no or low value.
It’s also possible a handful of power users use it a ton and found value, while the quiet majority only used it a few times because they were required to and didn’t see value.
We need more details to draw conclusions. For example:
- what types of tasks did people use it for? What roles did they have?
- what does the distribution of usage look like? What’s the median number of uses? What’s the average of users within one standard deviation?
- were they forced to meet some quota of uses, or were they left to choose on their own?
- what did the initial training look like?
.this basically just shows that AI assistants provide no benefit when they’re not used and nothing else.
so you think they may be useful but people just like to work harder? or perhps, they tried and saw no benefit at all and moved on?
Having been part of multiple projects introducing new software tools (not AI) to departments before, people are usually just stubborn and don’t want to change their ways, even if it enables a smoother work-flow with minimal training/practice. So yeah, basically people are so set in their ways,it is often hard to convince them something new will actually make their job easier.
The devil is in the details… what you describe screams to me what I call the “new boss syndrome”. New boss comes in and they feel the need to pee on everyone to mark their territory so they MUST bring in some genius change.
99% of the time, they are bringing in some forced change for the sake of change or something that worked on their previous place without taking into consideration the context.
I do not know anyone who prefers to work harder… either the changes proposed make no sense (or it’s too complex for people to understand the benefit) or the change is superfluous. That is usually where resistance to change comes from.
In all your software deployments did you blame the users for not getting it or did you redesign the software because it sucked (according to your users)?
I was one of the users, these are my observations with my colleagues reactions, and sometimes also myself.
That’s not what I’m asking. You designed or built something for some users. They didn’t like it, or didn’t use it as you expected. Was your response to change the software or blame the users for not using it correctly?
That depends on the issue. Sometimes it’s a lack of training, sometimes it’s obtuse software. That’s a call the product owner needs to make.
For something like AI, it does take some practice to learn what it’s good at and what it’s not good at. So there’s always going to be some amount of training needed before user complaints should be taken at face value. That’s true for most tools, I wouldn’t expect someone to jump in to my workflow and be productive, because many of the tools I use require a fair amount of learning to use properly. That doesn’t mean the tools are bad, it just means they’re complex.
Worth noting the average includes the people who did use it a lot too.
So you can conclude people basically did not use it at all.
We have it on our system at work. When we asked what management expected it to be used for they didn’t have an answer.
We have a shell script that ingests a list of user IDs and resets their active directory passwords, then locks the account, then sends them an email telling them to contact the support desk to unlock the account. It a cron job that runs ever Monday morning.
Why do a need an AI for when we can just use that? A script that can be easily read understood and upgraded, with no concerns about it going off-piste and doing something random and unpredictable.
So yeah, they don’t use it, because it won’t work.
Well yeah, AI shouldn’t replace existing, working solutions, it should be used in the research phase for new solutions as a companion to existing tools.
From reading the study, it seems like the workers didn’t even use it. Less than 2 queries per day? A third of participants used it once per week?
This is a study of resistance to change or of malicious compliance. Or maybe it’s a study of how people react when you’re obviously trying to take their jobs.
I don’t think it’s people being resistant to change I think it’s people understanding the technology isn’t useful. The tagline explains it best.
AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don’t bother with anything more complex
It’s a gimmick, not a fully fleshed out productivity tool, of course no one uses it. That’s like complaining that no one uses MS paint for the production of a high quality graphics.
Absolutely, and it’s a massive and undeserved cash cow for AI companies (e.g. Sam “Sister-Lovin’” Altman).
AI is never an investment for businesses or individual users. It’s a bloated and unfulfillable promise that just makes users dumb, dependant, and destroys the very environment we need to survive.
It also produces bad products (it’s easy to tell which devs use it from reviewing poor quality code).
Not to mention the centralisation of power with the rich who are the problem in this world.
The figures are the averages for the full trial period.
So it’s possible they were making more queries at the start of the trial, but then mostly stopped when if they found using Copilot was more a hindrance than a help.
I have a Copilot license at work. We also have an in house „ChatGPT clone“ - basically a private deployment of that model so that (hopefully) no input data gets used to train the models.
There are some usecases that are neat. E.g. we’re a multilingual team, so having it transcribe, translate (and summarize) a meeting so that it’s easier to finalize and check a protocol. Coming back from a vacation and just ask it summarize everything you missed for a specific area of your work (to get on track before just checking everything chronologically) can be nice, too.
Also we finetuned a model to assist us in writing and explaining code from a domain specific language with many strange quirks that we use for a tool and that has poor support from off the shelf LLMs.
But all of these cases have one thing in common: They do not replace the actual work and are things that will be checked anyways (even the code one, as we know there are still many flaws, but it’s usually great at explaining the code now - not so at writing it). It’s just a convenient method to check your own work - and LLM hallucinations will usually be caught anyway.
I think the issue is that there’s usually competing targets here. From the top they wanted to see use of copilot. But direct reports likely expected the same performance.
So are you going to a) do it the way you’ve done it for 10 years and know will deliver on time or b) ask hal9000 for help potentially actually slowing you down, at least initially.
I think there’s gains to be made for some jobs in some cases with ai. But most people probably just got on with their work.
Seeing a big uptake in use in the education sector. Teachers paying for their own ChatGPT pro license to lesson plan etc.
Can’t comment at this point if that’s right or wrong, you hope the teachers using it would identify hallucinations etc. But you can see there is already a change occurring.
I’ve show my coworkers some practical implementations of copilot and that was enough to kickstart the use.
If you’re composing the same mails a lot, for example, you can ask copilot to make a template text and then when you have to compose the same email again you ask copilot to compose and personalize the mail for you. That’s an awesome function.
I’ve made an agent that answers HR related questions of my team. This saves me and HR a lot of time and they are assured their questions are handled discrete.
If you’re composing the same mails a lot, for example, you can ask copilot to make a template text and then when you have to compose the same email again you ask copilot to compose and personalize the mail for you. That’s an awesome funtion.
Uhm, email templates are far older than LLM.
They also don’t make random artifacts out of nowhere
This template adds or deletes links to relevant webpages and adds recent figures when needed.
We’ve been using templates for years but this adds personality and customisation
personality
Wat
It sounds like it’s creating the template and also modifying it as needed. That is a step up.
There’s plugins that replace keywords for Thunderbird and Gnome Evolution (should realy change that name).
Why? Because using AI for something like this is a waste of computing power. And likely a confidentality breach.
Yea, but it’s still different to templates. My parents said playing video games was a waste of computing power. The confidentiality breach will be no worse than Gmail or Hotmail. So, not good, but also not new.
It’s not bad just because it’s AI. AI is much worse than it’s purported to be and hasn’t really progressed in a few years, but it has its uses.
Summarising and composing emails and other communications see a to be a strength.
So there’s this thing called drafts.
Because they don’t know how to use it.
I work for the government and we’re trialing Copilot too.
Yesterday I gave copilot several legal documents and our departments long term goals and asked to analyse those documents and find opportunities, legal complications and a matrix of proposed actions.
In less than 5 minutes I have a great overview to start talks with local politicians. This would have taken me at least a day before AI.
And you made sure that there are no invented points?
Of course they didn’t
Yes. If you feed the documents this goes well enough. It just speeds up the process where I start indexing and gathering information a lot.
In that case they would have spent “less than 5 minutes” more time than without this, or, one can say, “at least a day” plus “less than 5 minutes”.
100%. I’m also trialing Copilot at a medium-sized corpo job and it saves me roughly 12-20 hours of work per week.
I use it often in PowerShell scripting. It occasionally hallucinates and makes up commands, so sometimes it takes a bit of back and forth to get it to do what I want, but it’s still a hundred times easier than writing from scratch or tweaking+combining similar scripts I find online.
Probably my favorite part is being able to ask it “Where did I leave off with John on x issue last week?” And it will remind me that I’m supposed to do x and John is supposed to do y. Or even, “I helped a user with this specific issue six months ago. How did I fix it?” and it pulls the exact email and Teams chats outlining what we did, and I can click the link to open those messages and ensure it didn’t misinterperate. Way easier than digging by hand.
Finally, I absolutely hate making PowerPoints so I’ve been having it make all of my rough drafts from transcription notes in meetings. Super nice time saver.
Something I’m concerned about and playing with this week is pronoun usage in transcripts. I’m working with our LGBTQ ERG to ensure that we can make Copilot use preferred pronouns for everyone. If it can’t, we’ll need to pull back certain features.
It’s far from perfect but it genuinely makes my job a lot easier and I’d hate to lose it. I think it will only get better from here.
