Commentary: When Copilot becomes the KO-pilot
Volker Weber vents his anger that tech corporations are trying to sell him AI at every turn.
AI today: Stick your finger in someone's ear and ask: "Am I disturbing you?"
(Image: Andreas Wodrich/heise medien)
I admit, I'm not nice to Copilot. A text snippet named STFU automatically expands to a whole sentence that I hurl at the chatbot every time the know-it-all son of Karl Klammer a.k.a. Clippy interferes again. No matter where you step, you're guaranteed to encounter a helper named Copilot. In Microsoft Edge, Windows Search, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, in Notepad or Paint. The thing is in the way everywhere. You can easily display ten screamingly colorful icons on the desktop at the same time.
There are still switches in many places that allow you to turn off Copilot. This won't last long, because Microsoft is trying to push its use, each with very small quotas, so that the customer finally pays. For large customers, they place so-called Customer Success Managers. They have the mandate to push the use of Microsoft products.
Straw texts
Microsoft is the manufacturer that annoys me the most as a PC user. The plague has broken out in all American companies. Google is putting the knife to the throat of its cash cow "Search". Good results were successively replaced by advertising. The rest is now being eaten up by generative AI.
But it's not just the incredible intrusiveness with which software manufacturers push their wares onto users that gets on my nerves. The flood of generated images and videos undermines our trust in images, and texts padded with so much straw let any personality disappear. Just look at any feed on LinkedIn until you're disgusted.
Not only does it all sound so arbitrary, it's often terribly bad. For example, the input window says "Copilot can make mistakes. Using Copilot means you agree to the terms of service." Lawyers and judges can sing a song about indictments that were fantasized by generative AI, including fabricated sources.
A very funny comic strip by Tom Fishburne gets to the heart of the absurdity: "Look, this AI turns a bullet point into a long email." - "Cool, the AI summarizes this long email into a bullet point for me."
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed at the LlamaCon AI Event in April 2025 that 30 percent of Microsoft's code is now written by AI. Malicious observers would remark that you can tell. I wish for a big switch in Windows that banishes Copilot from my PC.
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Capital horse-trading
The driver of this whole madness is the capital market. You only get venture capital if you have an AI story - even if it's only aimed at turning large piles of money into glowing ashes as quickly as possible.
Everyone wants to be involved. After Mark Zuckerberg pumped billions into the metaverse without seeing a return, he is now switching to generative AI. The entire cash flow for 2026 will be allocated to this. Google and Microsoft at least have magnificent revenues from which they divert more and more. Sam Altman, with OpenAI, is succeeding in raising ever more future funds. What is worrying about this is that it often involves circular deals: "I'll buy your GPUs if you invest in my company."
How is this ever supposed to pay off? I can only think of one thing: tens of millions of jobs must be destroyed. These personnel costs, which no longer have to be paid, could be higher than the true costs of AI expansion. The top management of many companies is almost enthusiastic about rationalizing office jobs. One can only hope that a highly visible company tries this and fails spectacularly. Generative AI is similar to junior management consultants: confident demeanor with complete cluelessness. The signs are increasing that LLMs can simulate intelligence but not create it.
(vbr)
