• Copilot is Microsoft's generative AI tool now featured in much of its productivity programs.
• Copilot can draft text, analyze information and data, and suggest ideas.
• Copilot has also been plagued with security issues, and customers have criticized its effectiveness.

The entire tech industry is mired in an AI arms race, and Microsoft bet big on Copilot, its generative artificial intelligence chatbot.

Microsoft released Copilot in 2023, and rapidly rolled it out across various products and softwares. The company markets Copilot as a tool to help users with productivity tasks such as drafting a memo for work, adding to or amending hectic calendars, analyzing a spreadsheet or a few lines of code, or even writing a poem or short story.

By combing the vastness of the internet in fractions of a second to source troves of information and then engaging in machine learning and informed prediction, Copilot can create content; it can analyze, interpret, and explain extant data; and it can create systems for planning and managing many aspects of your life, from work to recreation to hobbies and more.

"We believe Copilot will be the new UI that helps you gain access to the world's knowledge and your organization's knowledge, but most importantly, it will be your agent that helps you act on that knowledge," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during a keynote address at Microsoft's annual Microsoft Ignite business conference in November 2023.

Not long after Copilot's launch, industry experts predicted that for the fiscal year 2024, Copilot would generate billions for the company. However, the AI tool is not without its flaws. Customers and company insiders have criticized Copilot for its ineffectiveness and cost, and IT leaders have questioned its value to their companies; the widespread disappointment in Copilot has raised doubts over its long-term profitability.

What is Microsoft Copilot AI?

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered chatbot that relies on large language models (often shorted to LLMs) to help users with productivity and content creation tasks. The more you use it, the more it learns about your interests, preferences, and habits, and the better it tailors itself to serving your needs. It's available for use on Windows, Macs, and both the Apple iOS, and Android mobile platforms.

You can use Microsoft Copilot in many programs that you likely already use, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, and more. It can assist you in rapidly creating and editing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more, acting both as your content creator and an editor and sort of AI coworker.

The basic version of Microsoft Copilot is free to use on the web, in Windows, with a Mac OS, and with Android and iOS. The free version includes access to GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, and GPT-4o during non-peak times. It also allows users to create and edit AI images, use plugins, and more.

However, there is also a paid version of Copilot called Copilot Pro, which offers more advanced features and better access. Copilot Pro includes all the features of the free version, plus priority model access and the ability to use Copilot in Microsoft apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote.

To use Copilot Pro, you need a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, which costs $6.99 per month for a personal subscription and $9.99 per month for a family subscription, good for up to six users. With Copilot Pro added, the total cost is around $26.99 per month.

Is Microsoft Copilot better than ChatGPT?

In some ways and for some uses, Copilot can be more effective than ChatGPT. Copilot is better for quick, tactical tasks that come about during your workflow, while ChatGPT is more commonly used for broader tasks and conversational AI, like for writing a creative story or rehearsing before a meeting or interview.

Copilot is part of the Microsoft ecosystem and can easily pull information from across Microsoft applications, which can be helpful, and it can also reply to questions with visual responses, such as photos and images. Also, unlike ChatGPT, which doesn't provide sources for its responses, Copilot does, making cross-referencing and fact-checking easier. That said, the paid version of ChatGPT is only $20 a month, so it's $7 cheaper than Copilot Pro.

What are the risks of using Microsoft Copilot?

Using Microsoft Copilot can pose several risks, including data leakage. Customers have already raised multiple security issues with Copilot, and in some cases delayed deployment over the concerns.

Copilot can generate outputs that include sensitive data, which may be shared with the wrong audience as the AI simply doesn't know better. For example, while you use Microsoft Teams, Copilot could summarize conversations and record action items against your better judgement, which could accidentally reveal private information.

There is also the all-too-common human problem of over-reliance. As Copilot and other AI tools become increasingly integrated into daily life, users may unknowingly rely on it more, which could impact investment and strategic decisions, how they write and express themselves, and frankly how much creative and critical thinking they do.

If you asked someone what they wanted from TVs released in 2025, I doubt they'd say "more software and AI." Yet, if you look at what TV companies have planned for this year, which is being primarily promoted at the CES technology trade show in Las Vegas this week, software and AI are where much of the focus is.

The trend reveals the implications of TV brands increasingly viewing themselves as software rather than hardware companies, with their products being customer data rather than TV sets. This points to an alarming future for smart TVs, where even premium models sought after for top-end image quality and hardware capabilities are stuffed with unwanted gimmicks.

LG’s remote regression

LG has long made some of the best—and most expensive—TVs available. Its OLED lineup, in particular, has appealed to people who use their TVs to watch Blu-rays, enjoy HDR, and the like. However, some features that LG is introducing to high-end TVs this year seem to better serve LG’s business interests than those users' needs.

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Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting […]

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Microsoft’s AI can now read your screen — or rather, the websites you’re browsing. On Thursday, the company began rolling out a limited, U.S.-only preview of Copilot Vision, a tool that can understand and respond to questions about sites you’re visiting using Microsoft Edge. Gated behind Copilot Labs, an opt-in program for experimental AI capabilities, […]

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• Microsoft's Bing search engine has Copilot AI features built into it.
• Copilot, integrated into Bing, can perform tasks like writing poems and making reservations.
• Here's how to use the AI service in Bing.

Microsoft first unveiled a revamped, AI-powered version of its search engine, Bing, last year.

The new Bing, which promised to be "more powerful than ChatGPT," runs on Microsoft's own next-generation language model called "Prometheus." The proprietary technology was developed using elements of OpenAI's most advanced GPT models as part of Microsoft's partnership with the company.

Built into the revamped search engine is Microsoft's AI chatbot, Copilot, which can perform a number of tasks the old Bing never dreamed of, like suggesting recipes, writing poems, conducting image-based search queries, and making restaurant reservations. Copilot was formerly called Bing Chat.

Microsoft's Bing was launched in 2009, more than a decade after Google's launch — and though it's come a long way since then, Bing still holds a fraction of the market share compared to Google.

And though Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once raved that Copilot would "fundamentally transform our relationship with technology," the AI assistant has struggled to live up to the hype, both inside and outside the company.

Here's a step-by-step walkthrough of how to access and use the new Bing with Copilot.

How to use the new Bing

1. Go to Bing.com/new in your internet browser.

   Note: You don't need to download Microsoft's web browser, Edge, but if you do, Copilot is integrated directly into the browser, with an icon in the top-right corner that lets you chat with the AI companion.

   

2. There are a few ways to use AI in your search experience from the Bing homepage.

3. One option is to click "Try now" underneath the heading "Bing generative search," located directly below the general search bar on the Bing homepage.

   

   • The "Try now" button takes you to a search results page that auto-populates for the query "How can I get started with learning to play the guitar."
   • The page displays several helpful resources related to that query, including a Table of Contents with sections that guide you through the process of learning to play guitar, alongside videos and step-by-step instructions.

   

   • You can also type in your own query, like "How to paint a bathroom," and, depending on the query you search, the results will offer helpful sections including relevant videos, instructions, and, in this case, a section on the side for the best paint to use on bathroom cabinets.

     

4. Another option is to click "Copilot" in the bar at the very top of the Bing homepage.

   

   • This takes you to the Copilot homepage where you can message the chatbot.

   • In the "Message Copilot" text field at the bottom of the page, you can type something you need help with, like, for example, "Write me a poem," or "plants that survive with minimal light." The chatbot will quickly give you a detailed response — for example, it offered 10 options for plants that don't need much light.

     

Google got some disappointing news at a status conference Tuesday, where US District Judge Amit Mehta suggested that Google's AI products may be restricted as an appropriate remedy following the government's win in the search monopoly trial.

According to Law360, Mehta said that "the recent emergence of AI products that are intended to mimic the functionality of search engines" is rapidly shifting the search market. Because the judge is now weighing preventive measures to combat Google's anticompetitive behavior, the judge wants to hear much more about how each side views AI's role in Google's search empire during the remedies stage of litigation than he did during the search trial.

"AI and the integration of AI is only going to play a much larger role, it seems to me, in the remedy phase than it did in the liability phase," Mehta said. "Is that because of the remedies being requested? Perhaps. But is it also potentially because the market that we have all been discussing has shifted?"

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Over five months after publicly scrapping the first version of the Windows Recall feature for its first wave of Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft announced today that a newly rearchitected version of Recall is finally ready for public consumption.

For now, the preview will be limited to a tiny subset of PCs: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Plus Copilot+ PCs enrolled in the Dev channel of the Windows Insider program (the build of Windows that includes Recall is 26120.2415). Intel and AMD Copilot+ PCs can’t access the Recall preview yet, and regular Windows 11 PCs won’t support the feature at all.

If you haven’t been following along, Recall is one of Microsoft’s many AI-driven Windows features exclusive to Copilot+ PCs, which come with a built-in neural processing unit (NPU) capable of running AI and machine learning workloads locally on your device rather than in the cloud. When enabled, Recall runs in the background constantly, taking screenshots of all your activity and saving both the screenshots and OCR’d text to a searchable database so that users can retrace their steps later.

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• Microsoft released tools to address security issues with its AI assistant Copilot.
• Copilot's indexing of internal data led to oversharing of sensitive company information.
• Some corporate customers delayed Copilot deployment due to security and oversharing concerns.

You know when a colleague overshares at work? It's awkward at best.

Microsoft's Copilot has been doing an AI version of this behavior, which has unnerved corporate customers so much that some have delayed deploying the product, as Business Insider first reported last week.

Now, the software giant is trying to fix the problem. On Tuesday, Microsoft released new tools and a guide to help customers mitigate a Copilot security issue that inadvertently let employees access sensitive information, such as CEO emails and HR documents.

These updates are designed "to identify and mitigate oversharing and ongoing governance concerns," the company explained in a new blueprint for Microsoft's 365 productivity software suite.

"Many data governance challenges in the context of AI were not caused by AI's arrival," a Microsoft spokesperson told BI on Wednesday.

AI is simply the latest call to action for enterprises to take proactive management of their internal documents and other information, the spokesman added.

These decisions are controlled by each company's unique situation. Factors such as specific industry regulations and varying risk tolerance should inform these decisions, according to the Microsoft spokesperson. For instance, different employees should have access to different types of files, workspaces, and other resources.

"Microsoft is helping customers enhance their central governance of identities and permissions, to help organizations continuously update and manage these fundamental controls," the spokesman said.

Copilot's magic — its ability to create a 10-slide road-mapping presentation, or to summon up a list of your company's most profitable products — works by browsing and indexing all of your company's internal information, like the web crawlers used by search engines.

Historically, IT departments at some companies have set up lax permissions for who can access internal documents — selecting "allow all," say, for the company's HR software, rather than going through the trouble of selecting specific users.

That never created much of a problem, because there wasn't a tool that an average employee could use to identify and retrieve sensitive company documents — until Copilot.

As a result, some customers have deployed Copilot, only to discover that it can enable employees to read an executive's inbox or access sensitive HR documents.

"Now, when Joe Blow logs into an account and kicks off Copilot, they can see everything," said one Microsoft employee familiar with customer complaints. "All of a sudden Joe Blow can see the CEO's emails."

Are you a Microsoft employee or someone else with insight to share?

Contact Ashley Stewart via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email ([email protected]). Use a nonwork device.

In the short-term, the most dangerous thing about AI language models may be their ability to emotionally manipulate humans if not carefully conditioned. The world saw its first taste of that potential danger in February 2023 with the launch of Bing Chat, now called Microsoft Copilot.

During its early testing period, the temperamental chatbot gave the world a preview of an "unhinged" version of OpenAI's GPT-4 prior to its official release. Sydney's sometimes uncensored and "emotional" nature (including use of emojis) arguably gave the world its first large-scale encounter with a truly manipulative AI system. The launch set off alarm bells in the AI alignment community and served as fuel for prominent warning letters about AI dangers.

On November 19 at 4 pm Eastern (1 pm Pacific), Ars Technica Senior AI Reporter Benj Edwards will host a livestream conversation on YouTube with independent AI researcher Simon Willison that will explore the impact and fallout of the 2023 fiasco. We're calling it "Bing Chat: Our First Encounter with Manipulative AI."

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