It’s not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that 95 percent of companies’ generative AI programs have failed to earn any profit whatsoever. Tech stocks tanked Tuesday, regarding broader fears that this bubble may have swelled about as large as it can go. Surely, there will be no wider repercussions for normal people if and when Nvidia, currently propping up the market like a load-bearing matchstick, finally runs out of fake companies to sell chips to. But getting in under the wire, before we’re all bartering gas in the desert and people who can read become the priestly caste, is Microsoft, with the single most “Who asked for this?” application of AI I’ve seen yet: They’re jamming it into Excel.
Excel! The spreadsheet program! The one that is already very good at what it does, which is calculation and data analysis. You put some numbers in and it spits some numbers out. According to The Verge, “Microsoft Excel is testing a new AI-powered function that can automatically fill cells in your spreadsheets.” Using natural language, the idea goes, you tell it what you want and then the AI will “classify information, generate summaries, create tables, and more.”
If you squint a little, or just look at this through the eyes of a person or company with a vested financial interest in shoving AI products into every cranny of your life, you can sort of see the vision. Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large. If everything works right, you’ll be able to tell the program, in words, broadly what you want it to do, rather than have to learn the formulas that already exist and have for decades, which tell the program exactly what you want it to do.
Ah, but there’s a rub. Microsoft explicitly warns users that its AI function should not be used for things like “doing math” or “anything actually important”:
When NOT to use the COPILOT function
COPILOT uses AI and can give incorrect responses.
To ensure reliability and to use it responsibly, avoid using COPILOT for:
Numerical calculations: Use native Excel formulas (e.g., SUM, AVERAGE, IF) for any task requiring accuracy or reproducibility.
Tasks with legal, regulatory or compliance implications: Avoid using AI-generated outputs for financial reporting, legal documents, or other high-stakes scenarios.
This is immediately identifiable as a problem, as I imagine that calculations and record-keeping are two of the more common uses of Excel—which, as already stated, was already pretty good at both of those things.
Think of it. Forty-five hundred years ago, if you were a Sumerian scribe, while your calculations on the world’s first abacus might have been laborious, you could be assured they’d be correct. Four hundred years ago, if you were palling around with William Oughtred, his new slide rule may have been a bit intimidating at first, but you could know its output was correct. In the 1980s, you could have bought the cheapest, shittiest Casio-knockoff calculator you could find, and used it exclusively, for every day of the rest of your life, and never once would it give anything but a correct answer. You could use it today!
But now we have Microsoft apparently determining that “unpredictability” was something that some number of its customers wanted in their calculators. I will admit to envisioning a thrilling frisson as I review the Defector P&L statement, not knowing if it will ensure our sustainable financial future or land us all in prison for fraud. I will enjoy it as much as the next fellow when I read Kathryn’s proprietary new evaluation model that identifies Giancarlo Stanton as MLB’s fastest runner, going first-to-third in 0.4 seconds on average. One can only hope that when you point out one of Copilot’s errors, it apologizes in that wheedling, I’m-just-a-smol-bean LLM register that makes me want to pour a glass of water into its mainframe.
If using Excel professionally is both an art and a science, adoption of Copilot could easily lead to a generation no longer able to properly use or understand it, while still somehow not actually allowing them to produce a useable result. Writ large this is the most poisonous and perhaps longest-lasting result of so much of the AI explosion, and its subsequent force-feeding into every revenue-generating maw—and on some level, is the entire business model: Get people addicted to the thing to the extent they can no longer function without it, and they will simply have to learn to live with it doing a bad job.
Recommended