Copilot Pro has landed, so why can’t it write this column for me?

“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” So said the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and I can only assume that Lewis Carroll had access to both a time machine and mind-reading equipment, because that’s precisely what I feel every month at this point. The magazine has to go to press! There’s too much to do! If only some kind of magical creature could help!

Well, that creature has arrived, and it is neither furry, nor white, nor the wearer of a waistcoat. Of course, I’m talking about AI. I currently subscribe to Copilot Pro and Google’s Gemini equivalent, and in theory they could certainly whip up 600 words for this column; all I would need to do, like a certain mouse in Fantasia if I may jump creative genres, is give them direction. A tidy up here, an edit there, job done. Anyone for a pint?

Sadly, we haven’t reached that point. Except, no, it’s not sad at all. If you read our guide to Copilot for Office this month ( see p26), and we include at least three jokes to make it worth your while, then you will get a clear idea of what AI is good for and what it’s rubbish at. I would summarise it thus: that AI summarises mush. The mush of our meetings, our emails, our documents and spreadsheets. Mush that we no longer need to attend, read or even write. Hallelujah! Anyone for a pint?

Okay, not quite yet. Because the other conclusion you will rapidly draw from the article is that AI can’t be trusted. It’s like one of those employees – if you don’t know one of those employees, you are one of those employees – who has an irritating habit of misunderstanding something, jumping to the wrong conclusion, and then repeating it ad nauseam. AI often acts like an amplified idiot rather than artificial intelligence, as it’s always so darn confident about things. You can’t give AI free rein, in the same way you wouldn’t let that employee run the company. It needs oversight.

At this point, you may be wondering why I’m paying almost

£40 per month for two services that I don’t trust. Services that can’t even write a column for me. But there are reasons, including a few surprises.

One is that Copilot’s generative AI art service – specifically, OpenAI’s DALL-E, which powers Microsoft Designer – is rather brilliant. Now that I’m getting to grips with prompts, it produces graphics that I can use professionally. For the first time in my life, I can turn ideas in my head into something resembling art.

In truth, that has been the only transformative aspect of Copilot so far for me. I occasionally use it in Word, to tidy up a sentence, and as a fail-safe: having written something, I sometimes check if there’s anything I’ve missed by getting the AI to auto-generate its own outline.

Another reason I keep subscribing is that I know these services are going to improve. It’s always a mistake to have a vitriolic reaction to the first generation of anything and think they’re going to stay that way. Just look at bendable phones; when Huawei showed me its first-generation Mate X five years ago, it wouldn’t even let me touch the phone, such was its fragility. This month I review the Honor Magic V2 ( see p70) and it’s light years ahead.

Will I be saying the same thing about the fifth-generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 ( see p58)? Well, that’s a question for the pub, and if there’s something that Word is good at it’s telling me word counts. 600 on the dot. Let’s hope I haven’t left it too late.