Scaling up a recipe for a massive gathering is a common holiday practice in my Italian American family. I tried showing Copilot a recipe for stuffed mushrooms from Sip and Feast. It acknowledged that to go from a serving size of six to 14 would require multiplying each ingredient by about 2.3 times, but it usually only did a couple calculations before expecting me to do the rest or trying to move on to another topic by asking me a question. When it noticed the site had options for scaling up the recipe, it mistook the “2x” and “3x” buttons for plus and minus ones that would let me dial in exactly 14 servings, and kept insisting that’s what those buttons are for. They aren’t. Then, as a last-ditch effort, I asked it to just calculate each ingredient and spell it out for me in a document. Copilot told me it would, and then did nothing.
Emphasis mine:
I’m inclined to think [the use of fictional company Relecloud] here points to all these advertised Copilot actions being simulated, but a Microsoft rep insists that’s not the case. Nicci Trovinger, general manager of Windows marketing, tells The Verge, “All Copilot responses are actual responses Copilot gave to the scenarios shown and questions asked at a point in time. Responses were shortened for brevity to fit the length of the creative spot, in line with standard advertising practices.”
“A point in time” could mean literally anything. You could have edited 100 hours of prompting down to 30 seconds and that would still technically be true. Holy fucking shit I hate advertisers :bill-hicks-marketing:
I get the sentiment but good grief multiply by two and add a little extra. It’s hot food not physics.
Idk if you read the article but Microsoft literally had Copilot do this exact thing in their Christmas ad. The author didn’t come up with this scenario, Microsoft’s marketing bozos did. The author tested all the scenarios from the ad and it failed at all of them.
Yeah. I read it.
