Copilot For OneDrive Will Fetch Your Files and Summarize Them (theverge.com) 39
An upcoming April release of Copilot for OneDrive will be able to find, summarize, and extract information from a wide range of files, including text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, HTML pages and PDF files. "Users can ask Copilot to tailor summaries to their liking, such as only including key points or highlights from a specific section," reports The Verge. From the report: The chatbot will also be able to respond to natural language prompts and answer highly specific questions about the contents of a user's files. Some examples given by Microsoft included asking Copilot to tabulate a week's worth of beverage sales and throw the data in a table view by day. Or, asking it to list the pros and cons of a project, or display the most recent or relevant files. Users can even ask Copilot for advice on how to make their documents better. Copilot on OneDrive will also be able to create outlines, tables, and lists for users, based on existing files. A few examples given were:
- Using the /sales-enablement.docx as reference, create an outline of a sales pitch to a new customer.
- For these selected resumes, create a table with names, current title, years of experience, educational qualifications, and current location.
- Create a list of frequently asked questions about project Moonshot.
- Using the /sales-enablement.docx as reference, create an outline of a sales pitch to a new customer.
- For these selected resumes, create a table with names, current title, years of experience, educational qualifications, and current location.
- Create a list of frequently asked questions about project Moonshot.
.. and send them back to the mothership /s (Score:2)
Re:.. and send them back to the mothership /s (Score:4, Insightful)
The files are already on the mothership.
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There's a difference between, "they can look at my files if they want to" and "I have specifically requested and authorized them to look at my files; they are fully authorized to read my files and extract content based details".
Re: .. and send them back to the mothership /s (Score:4, Informative)
â¦and they happily flag non-malicious content as malicious regardless of how you try to protect it from their all-seeing eye. Iâ(TM)ve even had security incident reports drafted for GDPR reporting purposes be flagged as malware, finding out from Microsoft it was literally because they contained *images* containing the phishing URLs (in a non-clickable form) of the already taken down phishing sites in them. When that happens, you have to mess about because email, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and every other usual method will not let you send the report to their intended recipients. To add insult to injury, these URLs were not blocked by Microsoft while the attacks took place and also bear in mind you have 72 hours to produce reports when incidents occur, regardless of whether the UK ICO decides they care or not.
I think it is safe to say that Microsoft analyses everything they can already with or without peopleâ(TM)s consent and will totally make use of LLMs even if you ignore this Copilot feature.
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And that's a distinction lost on MS.
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True but there's still a critical legal distinction as well as "I suspect and assume" vs "I gave them full permission".
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Re: .. and send them back to the mothership /s (Score:1)
Reverse would be more useful (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd prefer the reverse: I type in a summary and it finds the files that best fit that description.
Hallucinate in 3..2..1.. (Score:3)
I sure hope they have a lot of non-LLM smarts in there.
Otherwise get ready for a slew of automatically generated sales reports including non-existent products, papers with made-up authors, fake resume qualifications, and interesting if not absurd output based on vague prompts, that nobody realizes is wierd until it's too late.
Hell no (Score:3)
Onedrive is already an insane resource hog that makes file access slower than what I had on a ZX Spectrum. I do not want it to waste more of my time by analyzing every file with a LLM. Because of course Microsoft will be stupid enough to give that process a higher priority for file access than the user's priority, which means every file that ends up in a folder watched by Onedrive gets locked for ages before mere peons are allowed to open it.
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All your files are belong to us!
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Because of course Microsoft will be stupid enough to give that process a higher priority for file access than the user's priority
Fun rant, but literally no Microsoft service runs like this, and in fact many file system related services stop processing completely unless your computer has been idle for several minutes.
Slashdot used to be full of smart people with relevant complaints. It's now the comment section of the Daily Mail where 99.99% of braincells shut off every time you see the word Microsoft. At least people used to be clever when shitting on them (and deserving).
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This is behavior I observe every day: drop any file into a folder that is watched by OneDrive, and OneDrive will immediately lock the file and make it impossible for you to open or rename it while it synchronizes the file. Only when syncing is done are you allowed access to your files. I even made a batchfile that reduces the priority of onedrive.exe to 'lowest'. That did not help.
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And yet it's a behaviour I don't see at all, ever. I can do what you want while the file is synchronising. I will not say it's perfect and bug free. If you rename a file twice in quick succession the act of syncing drops you out of the second file renaming, but syncing runs entirely transparently in the background when working on a file already present on your machine.
And for the record, yes I do all my work on OneDrive synced folders, that's mandated for us, but I have no problem dropping even large files
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Onedrive is already an insane resource hog that makes file access slower than what I had on a ZX Spectrum. I do not want it to waste more of my time by analyzing every file with a LLM.
They are not analyzing every file with LLM. They will be using RAG, where a the search is done through more traditional indexing and only the end result is done with GenAI. Hence the name, Retrieval Augmented Generation.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Well, it is good enough for the NSA....
And the usual MS-Question applies (Score:2)
Can you turn it off and if, how?
And more. (Score:1)
A free software alternative (Score:1)
What could possibly go wrong?! (Score:2)
This is why I use OneDrive for everything in my life, thank you Microsoft for giving me yet another feature I never asked for but will integrate into the happy life only you could have provided me!
Do it with photos (Score:2)
Still waiting for that AI that will sift through my 50k photo, select and annotate the top 1000 and throw away the rest
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Still waiting for that AI that will sift through my 50k photo, select and annotate the top 1000 and throw away the rest
Photo tagging is pretty much a solved problem by now. Many photo catalog tools have AI-tagging built in. Already back in 2017, we built a solution using cloud-based AI APIs, which added keywords and descriptions to a large professional image archive. Utilizaed three different APIs and added only those keywords, which the different services agreed on.
And... (Score:2)
Remember When Computers Used to Work for Us? (Score:3)
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There was a day, when your computer spying on you would have been a scandal.
Not to mention your refrigerator, washing machine, phone, doorbell, television, printer... Then there are things like Alexa and Siri - known and obvious agenda-driven spies which people actually pay for and invite into their homes.
Yup, the world has gone to hell in a hand-basket. And even the basket is probably spying...
It will...but it's shit at it (Score:2)
I asked Copilot to summarize a pdf I'd written myself about some life-story stuff on storyworth, and it started doing an ok job, then made up a complete nonsense story about me going to Amsterdam, meeting the woman who would eventually be my wife there while we had lots of fun, including running from the cops.
Not even faintly true, nor could that be inferred from anything I wrote.
It did get my wife's name right.
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It did get my wife's name right.
Hey, there is hope! Give it another 1000 years and maybe it will get your name right as well!
This is spyware (Score:3)
Time to clean my storage (Score:2)
⦠and leave only my encrypted backup files.
If I still want to have something available on the cloud, I can remove the extension, so that it will become unreadable by Microsoft applications. ;-)
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If I still want to have something available on the cloud, I can remove the extension, so that it will become unreadable by Microsoft applications. ;-)
Best NOT do that - I hear even Microsoft employees are now using Linux to some extent. 8^}
A great big raid on user-data, obviously. (Score:2)
Because, obviously, all that data will be stored, processed and used for training "AI" and marketing.
At this time, anybody sane must really refrain from storing anything but public files on a Windows machine.
Meanwhile..... (Score:2)
BeauHD: *CoPilot -> Summarize*
BeauHD: *wget --post-file Summary.txt https://slashdot.org/submissio... [slashdot.org] *