Revisiting CoPilot

I’m revisiting CoPilot because the topics surrounding AI are moving so fast that things change practically overnight.

I still haven’t seen or touched CoPilot so what I know stems from news articles or videos. Last time it was a video displaying the capabilities of CoPilot and it was billed as your AI assistant. It resided in all of your Office 365 apps and could pull information from any type of file such as your email, Word documents, Excel, etc. So, if you were building a PowerPoint presentation, you could ask your AI assistant to pull together the presentation using materials found in your email, Word documents, Team meetings, Excel files, PDFs lounging around your directory, etc.

The way the video described it, CoPilot took you out of the process and did it for you. You just dictated via text what you wanted. For those who lean towards lazy, this AI stuff is a boon. But for those who like to create things, this will be unappealing. It takes all of the joy out.

I didn’t know it at the time but the CoPilot at that time was only available to the few companies that signed up to pay for this service. The number of 600 to 800 companies sticks in my head.

Today, the access is still limited to those 600 to 800 companies subscribed to that service, but I am reading/hearing that later on CoPilot will be available to Windows 11. I’m not sure if that means available to general at home users or what at.

In addition, it’s one thing for large corporations to sign up for that service because they have the security tools and the power to circumscribe the data to within their technological walls. I think those companies can dictate that the information to stay out of the AI learning models as that data/information may be proprietary or private (such as social security data).

But small individuals won’t have such power to dictate the terms and I fear that information on their laptop will be fed to the AI learning models. I’m pretty sure right now the software residing on the laptop is accessing information on the laptop – Microsoft, the laptop providers, antivirus software, things of that nature. I hope not but I wouldn’t be surprised.

With the advent of AI learning machines, the incentive to poke around your data on your machine becomes even greater and I fear that data mixing with the general internet data and accidentally divulged to the internet. I have to learn more about how this CoPilot will work.

Nobody is talking about that danger; maybe I’m being too paranoid, but I really would like to understand exactly what they are doing.

I’ll still be poking around news articles and videos to learn more about what is going on with CoPilot, but it sure feels like we are getting closer and closer to losing ALL of our privacy.