My AI fail of the day... "today"

[chazzy2501]

asked copilot if there was a fire drill today and it surfaced nothing... so out in the cold my butt goes..

 

it was a drill, I got an email 2 days ago... here is what copilot said in response:

 

Quote

You’re absolutely right—the email from 1st December with “fire drill” in the subject and body should have been surfaced. Here’s why it didn’t show up in my initial search:

• Scope of the first query: I searched broadly for “fire drill today” across multiple domains. That phrase didn’t match the email exactly because it was about the drill happening today, but the email itself was sent earlier and didn’t include “today” in the same way.
• Search behaviour: Copilot uses enterprise search APIs that prioritise relevance and context, but they don’t always behave like a simple Outlook keyword search. If the query is too specific or slightly different from the actual wording, results can be missed.

In short: Outlook search is literal and fast for exact matches. Copilot search tries to interpret intent and fan out across multiple sources, which can sometimes skip an exact match if the phrasing differs.

 

I was getting quite impressed at the power of AI then this total miss, reminds me.. 

[synaesthesia]

I actually used an AI thing yesterday for the first time - what would have been hours of searching took seconds with Gemini.

Needed a powershell script to list all users in a particular OU along with their home drive and profile path. I'm crap at Powershell, and that would have taken a good hour or so finding 5-10 sites with NEARLY the right information and trying to find the one workable solution from it - which then usually results in getting a CSV file with just about everything then manually removing the crap from Excel to get what I need.

Impressed that I got the command and a full breakdown of each part of the syntax!

[NegativeKillDeath]

I saw something similar on an Ars Technica article about Gemini in Google nest cams. When asked if there had been a delivery that day Gemini replied no (there had been). When asked what happened at a specific time that day (the time of the delivery) Gemini replied that a delivery happened. 

[Koldov]

I asked Gemini to simply display the 'Meeting digital and technology standards in schools and colleges' core headings and sub-section headings from the .Gov website so I could just 'quickly' add it as an index to a report I'm writing for the HT.

 

Suffice to say, what with it adding various random sub-sections and either summarising the headings or trying to make them out of a synopsis of the subject matter, it took over an hour of back and forth (doing other jobs in between) with me having to double check every response for accuracy... would have been quicker for me to go to the webpage, expand all the sections and copy/paste them individually...

 

What's more annoying is every time I corrected it, its response started with "Yes, you are right"...

[jthompson]

1 minute ago, Koldov said:

I asked Gemini to simply display the 'Meeting digital and technology standards in schools and colleges' core headings and sub-section headings from the .Gov website so I could just 'quickly' add it as an index to a report I'm writing for the HT.

 

Suffice to say, what with it adding various random sub-sections and either summarising the headings or trying to make them out of a synopsis of the subject matter, it took over an hour of back and forth (doing other jobs in between) with me having to double check every response for accuracy... would have been quicker for me to go to the webpage, expand all the sections and copy/paste them individually...

 

What's more annoying is every time I corrected it, its response started with "Yes, you are right"...

Try NotebookLM. You might have more success with that kind of task. Add the article's URL to a notebook at can summarise stuff like that for you really nicely.

[Pottsey]

5 minutes ago, Koldov said:

What's more annoying is every time I corrected it, its response started with "Yes, you are right"...

That's better then what I have been getting. Instead of correcting mistakes or saying it got it wrong it acts like it was right all along. Last night I couldn't find a setting I was after so asked the AI and it was telling me to go into a systems sub menu that never existed. Then when I asked it why it told me to do that it said something along the lines of, by system sub menu in the program it was referring to the config file in documents so it wasn't wrong. 

 

Outside of photo editing AI for me has been 20% amazing with saving time while 80% down right frustrating. Photo Editing more heavily into saving time.