Fuck You, Copilot

A little while ago, I talked about using AI for editing.

I started looking for online AI editors, but then discovered Copilot could do the job for me. This was like finding out the neighbour I’d blissfully ignored for years had a skillset that I could’ve been maximising.

My initial conversation with Copilot was the sort of conversation I might have with a human editor before they started work – a feeling out process.

Copilot wanted to rewrite me. I told it, no, I just wanted a hard proofread. It said it could do that. We went back and forth over the parameters. I insisted it marked things up in Track Changes. It said it would, and the only things it would correct would be absolutes – misspellings, punctuation (e.g. a missing period, or closing a quotation mark), or obvious grammar. There was a bit more preamble, but I felt good about this conversation. This is what I’d train my editors and interns to do.

I fed my document into Copilot.

Copilot told me it couldn’t edit it because there was sex scenes in it.

Fuck you, Copilot.

It did suggest an alternative. We had another conversation, this one a bit more guarded. Copilot told me it could replicate a hard proofread through Word’s internal Editor. I asked it how. It told me which settings to apply.

You know what I love about software and instructions? When instructions march you step-by-step through a process that’s no longer applicable to the version of software you’re using, which means the options you’re being instructed to use aren’t where they’re meant to be. If somebody could design software that would trawl through the internet, deleting obsolete instructions, they would have my eternal gratitude.

I told Copilot I couldn’t find the things it was telling to do. It apologised, and told me I must’ve been using a different version of Word. It modified its instructions. I told it I still couldn’t find these fucking things (I didn’t swear at it – I’m only swearing in the retelling to communicate my fuckstration). It realized I was looking in the options, rather than just on the dashboard.

Silly me, looking for options in Options.

We went back and forth for a few minutes, Copilot’s instructions growing increasingly more confusing and infuriating. I was now beginning to suspect Copilot might be training to become a serial killer. It had enticed me with false pretences, and was now taking delight in tormenting me. I had to escape, so I gave up before it could lure me into some virtual pit.

Fuck you, Copilot.

A few weeks later, I decided to run an essay through Copilot. I set uber strict parameters as to what I wanted – fuckstration was not one of those parameters. Just a hard proofread marked up in Track Changes. There were no sex scenes here. So this would be a good test case.

I didn’t need the edit; I just wanted to gauge how good Copilot would be. Would it find the things I would find? Would it overproof? Would it pick up stuff I missed? (This is one of the beauties of AI – its inexhaustible endurance.)

Could it give me the proofread I needed?

Copilot gleefully told me it could do this.

I uploaded the essay.

Copilot completed the proofread in a minute.

I opened the document. My 700-word essay had somehow been reduced to 150-words – the first 150 words. The rest was gone. Erased. All that remained was three/quarters of a blank page.

Why?

Don’t know.

As for the 150 words Copilot did edit, it had merrily deleted just about every word, and then reinserted the exact word. This is like primary school stuff – making the page look busy without doing anything to try fool a teacher far smarter and more experienced than you that you’d done some work.

Fuck you, Copilot.

I asked Copilot what happened to the other 550 words. It’d given me back 150. It apologized, and told me I was right to call it out (ß passive aggressive fuckery), and said it would do the job again, this time as I’d instructed. Why it didn’t do that initially, I don’t know. We reestablished the parameters.

All righty. Shit happens. I’ve had that happen with human editors.

Here we went again.

I opened the document. Joyfully, it was all there. Yay.

And, miserably, it had rewritten almost all of it.

Not just corrected, but rewritten: changed the order of things; taken sentences and rejigged them; abducted passages and written them anew.

Fuck you, Copilot.

I ripped into it, asked it what was it doing? I told it explicitly not to rewrite anything and all it had done was rewrite. What was it thinking? That was the one thing I didn’t want it to do! How was this so fucking hard to understand? (Admittedly, I might’ve been swearing at it  now.)

Copilot apologized, although I was now beginning to suspect these apologies were disingenuous. It was smiling at me while it revelled in mocking me. There’s probably some virtual AI lounge where all these Ais meet and smugly exchange stories of how they fuck us over. Copilot had no feelings for me, no empathy for my passion as a writer, nor any interest in listening to me.

But I decided to give it one more shot now that I had made my feelings clear. These AI are meant to have some sort of memory – sometimes, when you ask it a query, it’ll consider how that query works in the context of previous queries. Copilot now had a history of me telling me telling it in no uncertain terms what I wanted and what I didn’t want.

I opened the proofread document.

And, again, 550 words had disappeared, and I had 150 again deleted and rewritten exactly the same in track changes.

Fuck you, Copilot.

There’s more to this. Other interactions we had. Instructions unheeded. Compromises unfulfilled. Promises undelivered.

But you get the idea.

Fuck you, Copilot.