- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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If done correctly it could actually be useful. It could read the input text, select the numbers above, and feed those numbers to the sum command.
But no, the language model is told to solve a mathematical equation with no assistance. Of course it’s going to fail.
To be fair, MS says you shouldn’t use it for caculations.
“Why is it there then?” No clue.
As far as I can tell, it’s for people who already use excel wrong. The examples I’ve seen involve using it to process text in natural language (duh, that’s what LLMs are best at). I could see using it to turn aggregated numbers (calculated using deterministic algebra, not Copilot) into a presentation, if you assemble the facts it’s supposed to use, but at that point I’d just as quickly slap them into our corporate template and not worry about tweaking a prompt to spare me from having to actually exercise any non-technical skills.
The example I saw them use was turning one line text reviews into a simple positive or negative so you can count them.
So it could be useful for things like that, even if we ignore the “then why not just ask for the star rating” that probably went along with that review…
MS is now an AI company that sells to excited bosses who would love to fire somebody somewhere to save a few bucks.
I used to work for Comcast as a mobile app developer. We used to get uncountable numbers of reviews along the lines of “I gave this app one star because you can’t give an app zero stars”. Honestly depressing even though I wasn’t personally responsible for the apps or the company.
AI in Excel is the dumbest thing I’ve seen MS pull out and the dumbest use of AI I’ve ever seen. And I’m not exaggerating. Read on, cause imma fucking rant.
Excel is the about only reason business uses MS Office. Any free alternative would be just fine for word processing and slide shows. But you cannot risk your numbers and formulas being up for interpretation when they move across software packages and versions, inside or outside the company. (Not to mention broken macros for the power users.)
Can you imagine a near future where Excel is not trusted?! I’m certain you can turn if off, but still, I want to scream. They better at least come out with a GPO that disables it. If the sysadmin can’t control its use, people are going to use it, purposefully or not.
There are billions of man hours and expertise in Excel, it works, it’s compatible across versions, it never, ever, for fucking ever changes. That last point has been the pillar of Excel’s strength from day one. On top of that all, Excel is best in class, no question, no competition.
And now MS threatens to fuck up their flagship Office product, uh, for what gain exactly? Fuck is Nadella thinking?!
“So we got this golden goose, lays eggs like there’s no tomorrow. Let’s risk killing it by trying to squeeze another few eggs a year. Not even sure how AI might work in this use case, but let’s go for it.”
It’s not even a gamble in this situation. Put that shit in every Office product but Excel.
(Yes, I know, alternatives are fine for personal use and finance.)
EDIT: someguy3 pointed out that it appears one has to purposefully use it in the address bar. Still worrying that people have access, but at least it can be cut off via GPO.
User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft 365 Apps > AI FeaturesAI in Excel sounds great as a prompting system to make features more usable. As auto complete for cell level values it would be absurd. Being able to prompt a pivot table or let AI figure out the combination of functions to get a value you wanted seems useful.
Programmers use AI for assistance. It can be good or bad depending on the programmer.
Excel is a really a development environment.
Just like a bad programmer would use AI to write a function to add two numbers, a bad Excel user would use AI to add two numbers. But if you needed a complex formula and were not sure how to start, AI could give a suggestion that might be right or wrong just like using Stack Overflow. It’s up to the programmer to understand and test the results.
I’m amazed that it can’t figure out that it should just defer arithmetic to like, all the functions that Excel already has, rather than trying to LLM its way to the correct answer.
If you could ask it to do something in Excel that you don’t know how to do, and it did it using Excel functions and maybe explained it to you, that would be useful, but as it is now, that thing isn’t trustworthy at all.
You’re thinking about it as a user. AI based auto complete is an impressive sounding feature that got someone a promotion or bonus.
They straight up tell you to not use it for math. It’s for analyzing a bunch of text you shoved into a spreadsheet, say for example customer testimonials or something. Making it work most of the time would actually be worse, because then people would be more inclined to use it instead of writing the formulas to do it right.
Shouldn’t excelAI know when it’s doing math?
No AI truly knows what it’s doing. You can give it things to call out to, but you can’t know for sure if it will use them, and definitely can’t know it will pass it the right parameters.
