A demo of educational AI-powered tools by a Microsoft product manager (in March of 2024) showed "how AI has the possibility to transform various job sectors and the education system," according to one report.
But that demo "includes a segment on Copilot in Excel that is likely to resonate with AI-wary software developers," writes long-time Slashdot theodp:

The Copilot in Excel segment purports to show how even teachers who were too "afraid of" or "intimidated" to use Excel in the past can now just use natural language prompts to conduct Excel analysis. But Copilot advises the teacher there are no 'outliers' in the exam scores for their 17 students, whose test scores range from 27%-100%. (This is apparently due to Copilot's choice of an inappropriate outlier detection method for this size population and score range). Fittingly, the student whose 27% score is confidently-but-incorrectly deemed to be of no concern by Copilot is named after Michael Scott, the largely incompetent and unprofessional boss of The Office. (Microsoft also named the other exam takers after characters from The Office).

The additional Copilot student score "analysis" touted by Microsoft in the demo is also less than impressive. It includes: 1. A vertical bar chart that fails to convey the test score distribution that a histogram would have (a rookie chart choice mistake), 2. A horizontal bar chart of student scores that only displays every other student's name and shows no score values (a rookie formatting error)... So, will teachers — like programmers — be spending a significant amount of time in the future reviewing, editing, and refining the outputs of their AI agent helpers?

"Not only does it illustrate how the realities of AI assistants sometimes fall maddeningly short of the promises," argues the original submission. "The demo also shows how AI vendors and customers alike sometimes forget to review promotional AI content closely in all the AI excitement!"

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/12/0328228/in-copilot-in-excel-demo-ai-told-teacher-a-27-exam-score-is-of-no-concern?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.