Matt Owens Rees

Part of the Behind the Bamboo Curtain series. Relevant to Thailand as elsewhere.

As a junior accountant, in my first job, I helped my boss sort though stacks of computer printout to identify mistakes.

In fact, I did most of the work!

Those inputting the data on product yield were incorrectly interpreting the quantities of the product involved. I had to manually correct the printouts.

A typical entry showed a single pack of product of 100 pieces as being 100 packs. I had to amend the yields manually.

My boss made the observation that there should have been a system for checking the first entry. Instead, a button was pressed and a whole stack of garbage was released.

Many man-hours were needlessly lost.

CoPilot AI is fast but perhaps too fast

I use CoPilot AI to research details on topics I write about.
Their databases are very extensive and they come up with pages of detail within less than one second.

And that’s the problem. They don’t check that data. If it’s on the internet, they’ll use it.

As in my example above, the garbage is instantly released. There is no human insight.

In fact, the robot can not even inform a human developer when advised of errors.

Today, they did some great work on Thai land ownership law as it relates to foreigners. They quoted detailed acts – again within less than a second.

It would have taken me at least an hour.

I edited their work, checked their sources, made some necessary changes, and told them that I was ready to publish to my website.

Big Mistake

Big mistake, they suggested changing the agreed text to HTML format. The result was a mess I did not recognise. The text had been truncated from my original and made no sense.

I immediately asked them to go back to the agreed version. But that was not possible, once converted for HTML suitability, the original version is lost forever.

It’s a bug in their system which they can’t even alert their developers to.

All the robot could do was try to reconstruct.

The result was text that had nothing to do with Thailand or the original piece agreed with them.

It contained serious inaccuracies. They were randomly picking up pieces found on their huge databases.

Responses from CoPilot

CoPilot’s chatty style, which I like, makes one think you’re talking with a human. The developers have deliberately adopted this style.
But it lulls many people into believing everything they say is true.

Like humans, they apologise profusely, and stress they’ll get it right.

It can be irritating when they repeatedly apologise but fail to put things right.

I understand why they can’t correct the text – they no longer have it. But they should not gather irrelevant data from the internet to resolve the mistake.