Microsoft Warns Excel's New AI Function 'Can Give Incorrect Responses' in High-Stakes Scenarios 54
Microsoft is testing a COPILOT function in Excel that uses OpenAI's gpt-4.1-mini model to automatically fill spreadsheet cells through natural language prompts. The function can classify feedback, generate summaries, and create tables based on specified cell ranges. Microsoft warns against using the AI function for numerical calculations or scenarios involving legal, regulatory, and compliance implications because COPILOT "can give incorrect responses." The feature processes up to 100 functions every 10 minutes and cannot access information outside the spreadsheet.
Annoying. (Score:5, Informative)
This feature is super annoying. I'll be trying to fill in cell by cell and constantly need to recheck every time I hit enter because sometimes it will just make up stuff for the rest of the data and it's hard to notice until it's too late sometimes.
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I'll be trying to fill in cell by cell and constantly need to recheck every time I hit enter because sometimes it will just make up stuff for the rest of the data and it's hard to notice until it's too late sometimes.
Wait... so it just auto-completes more of the row data without you asking it to do so?
TFS sounded bad enough, but it implied that one had purposefully used it in some form, and then the result isn't guaranteed to be right.
Also, 100 times every 10 minutes may be OK if it's only run during manual data entry (average of one every six seconds), but what if I paste the function down a column with 65k rows? Or send someone a spreadsheet that does that? I'm guessing it does something to handle that as an exception
The Megajoule PRNG (Score:4, Funny)
Why use a millijoule when a Megajoule can do the same thing.
Excel no longer fit for purpose. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Excel no longer fit for purpose. (Score:4, Funny)
Said every single upper management person.
Re:Excel no longer fit for purpose. (Score:4, Insightful)
"My feelings are as good as your facts" is not a good way to go about things.
Re:Excel no longer fit for purpose. (Score:4, Insightful)
But of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
...even in high-stakes scenarios they won't allow you to turn CoPilot off entirely so that it won't put you at risk, oh no.
They also forget to acknowledge that while regulatory correctness is of course of big importance when it comes to those sensitive environments, correctness of calculations is EQUALLY important for an average Joe who's doing his sheets for personal reason.
But they always think about the collectives and shit on the potential impact on individuals...
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Your ideology is showing. This has nothing to do with 'the collectives' or the individual.
It is about a bunch of idiots being entranced by their newest toy, "AI" and thinking 'We should use it EVERYWHERE".
Re: But of course... (Score:2)
Well... Yes. It's my comment. Of course it projects my own ideology. Whose else would it be? Santa Clause's?
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Justifying latest tech scam?
I wonder what is in the flavor-aide the executive tech bros are all drinking deeply of for the last 5 years.
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You're digging your own digital grave and you don't have a choice thanks to 50 years of zero antitrust law enforcement.
It's a political problem not an economic one but people don't like to hear that so...
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they need to be able to monitor you
Welcome to ~2014. Telemetry, CEIP etc has all been around for 10 years. https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
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Always remember that a model is useless without training data.
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Will the IRS accept the AI hallucinations as correct? If not, then who gets the liability for mid filing your taxes, you or Microsoft?
My bulletin board has a Hagar the Horrible comic where Hagar is arguing with a tax collector. The last panel shows them standing in front of a wheel of taxation (like the wheel of fortune). Life is following art again.
We know. (Score:5, Funny)
You told us it was AI. Saying it gives incorrect responses is redundant.
Re: We know. (Score:5, Funny)
Should have been called Artificial Information.
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Actually Incorrect.
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Re: We know. (Score:2)
Love it.
Re: We know. (Score:2)
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Augmented Idiocy.
This copilot (Score:2)
is like the one who locks the door to the cockpit while you're taking a leak and then flies the plane into a mountainside.
Just a toy. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what it is. We're giving adult people a rattle and make them believe it's a spaceship. Too bad there won't be anyone responsible to change their nappy when they shit themselves while playing.
WTF?!! (Score:5, Insightful)
[Why The Fark] would I want a feature that inputs bad data?!!
That performs bad calculations?!!
Shit, just make a tool that generates Lorem Ipsum text across a grid of X by Y cells and be done with it.
Maybe a boost for LibreOffice? (Score:5, Interesting)
If MS makes this feature (anti-feature?) difficult or impossible to turn off, might it increase LibreOffice adoption?
I suppose it won't have much of an impact, because MS has become quite expert at raising the temperature just slowly enough to stop the frogs from jumping out of the pot. Still, it's nice to think that their push to control their users' experience, and to force them to subscription models with advertising baked in, might someday result in a huge "fuck off" and a mass migration to free-and-open alternatives.
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If a computer doesn't have to be consistent ... (Score:1)
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welcome to quantum computing?
Bet it won't count low (Score:2)
Call it the (Score:4, Insightful)
...Darwin Award Function. If you rely on a bot to make key decisions, you deserve whatever mayhem the bot deals you.
= DarwinAwardGPT("Your prompt request")
LOL (Score:1)
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the new m365 landing page is just a giant copilot scam download add use copilot and nothing else matters advertisement. hard to actually find apps
Anyone who uses AI in... (Score:2)
..."High-Stakes Scenarios" without cross checking and verifying deserves what they get
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umm you make it sound like we are given a choice here, between bing and google AI browsing has become a nightmare with no ability to make it go away. apps are headed that way.
Going against the tide here... but it looks useful (Score:2)
Good use case: =COPILOT("These cells contain fulltext feedback we collected about the new coffee machine",A1:A100,"Assign one of these categories next to each comment",D1:D5)
Bad use case: =COPILOT("Take this export from our sales system",A1:AK1000,"give me three names of people who should be promoted. Be careful. Good luck.")
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Good use case: =COPILOT("These cells contain fulltext feedback we collected about the new coffee machine",A1:A100,"Assign one of these categories next to each comment",D1:D5)
Reminds me of a joke I had just run across:
Interviewer: "I heard you were extremely quick at math"
Me: "yes, as a matter of fact I am"
Interviewer: "Whats 23x857"
Me: "492"
Interviewer: "that's not even close"
me: "yeah, but it was fast"
Might want to prefix it with some few-shot learning examples or similar.
Not anit-AI but stop shoving it down my throat (Score:2)
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but how are you going to love it unless it is shoved deep down your throat repeatedly,
i may be confused
Which makes it well-nigh useless (Score:3)
So uhh (Score:2)
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Yes, but most people knew that already
wat (Score:2)
Microsoft is testing a COPILOT function in Excel [...] Microsoft warns against using the AI function for numerical calculations
So, don't use it at all? Because that's literally what spreadsheets are for? I agree.
Even better would be to not use Excel at all, because Microsoft has been destroying all of its advantages. It isn't fastest any more. It isn't most reliable. It doesn't have the best interface. It used to have/be all of those things. Now literally the only things it has over LibreOffice Calc are live pivot tables and a split function that doesn't require that users know how to build a regexp. LO Calc could have clear techni
No, shit (Score:2)
Try using that fucking hot mess in MS Word. It's fucking useless and so annoying I could scream. The damned thing pokes in and asks if I want to re-write shit or want to use some obscure function.
Copilot is now the new Clippy that we call all hate for wasting cpu cycles.
Ax-cel: a new way to calculate (Score:1)
Old Rule (Score:2)
Excel doesn't need AI to fail (Score:3)
Excel 2007 display bug: Some calculations like 77.1 * 850 incorrectly displayed 100000 instead of the correct 65535. The value in memory was correct, only the display was wrong.
1900 leap year bug: Excel incorrectly treats 1900 as a leap year due to legacy Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility. This affects date math and WEEKDAY calculations.
Floating-point precision errors: Excel uses IEEE 754 doubles, but subtraction of similar numbers (e.g. 22.26 - 21.29) can yield unexpected results like 0.970000000000002.
STOCKHISTORY function bug: In Microsoft 365, this function sometimes shows #CONNECT! or wrong stock prices.
Circular reference calculation bug: In some cases, Excel returns 0 or invalid values due to silent circular references that are not flagged properly.
Statistical function inaccuracies: Some functions like STDEVP used numerically unstable algorithms, causing subtle inaccuracies in large or skewed datasets.
MOD bug (older versions): MOD sometimes returned incorrect results when used with floating-point arguments near precision limits.
Cell limit bugs: Pre-Excel 2007, exceeding 65,536 rows silently truncated data. In rare cases, formula ranges referencing these limits produced wrong totals or #REF errors.
Forget the pain, give us money (Score:2)
Then, what is the purpose of MS Excel? They're demanding that people treat software that costs hundreds of dollars, as a toy.
Many people can't make a good spreadsheet, with their best effort. How are they going to handle software that sabotages their work? Yes, that is all Microsoft Co-pilot is offering and MS Corp. is demanding that everyone is obedient to it. How greedy can they get? As already noted, a giant calculator (spreadsheet) that guesses answers will be replaced, with haste.
Everyone is t