Windows Copilot Newsletter #1
An update from Microsoft puts Windows Copilot into release - but could it deliver malware ads to Windows 11 desktops?
Hello, and welcome to the first Windows Copilot Newsletter, a weekly drop of all the most important and most interesting news about Windows Copilot, Bing Chat, and the rapidly expanding universe of AI chatbots.
Lots to cover this week, so let’s dive right in:
Top News
Microsoft sent out its latest 22H2 Windows 11 update, putting its Windows Copilot into general release, with deep integrations across the entire operating system used by hundreds of millions. Read more here.
Meta will be putting AI chatbots into all of its messenger products: Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. That will bring AI chatbots to nearly 3 billion users. All about that here.
Amazon will be supercharging Alexa with an AI chatbot. Read more here.
If you have ChatGPT+, you can now talk to it - and hear it talk back - via the mobile app. You can also share images with it, which led to one enterprising designer uploading a wireframe, and asking ChatGPT+ to generate code to make it all work. (Which it promptly did.) Read about that here.
Top Tips
What are the common mistakes you should avoid when using ChatGPT - or any AI chatbot? Here’s five of the big ones.
Did you know that you can improve the results delivered by an AI chatbot simply by prompting it to ‘take a deep breath and work on this problem step by step”? Read the research here.
Safely & Wisely
Be careful what you click on! Bing Chat has been shown to be injecting malware-laden advertising into its completions. Read all about that here.
Be careful what you share! It seems that Google Search may be indexing information fed into it AI chatbot, Google Bard. So the questions you ask Bard could well become public knowledge. Read about that here.
Longreads
Why are all of the tech giants rushing to release AI chatbots integrated into every product they make? That’s the question I ask and answer in my first post to Windows Copilot Strategies.
“In the less than 300 days since the launch of ChatGPT, a tectonic shift has completely reordered technology, as we have pivoted away from interactions based on decades of research in User Experience Design, into a headlong run toward a deep integration of a still quite poorly understood ‘transformer’ model of computing that generates ‘completions’ to user ‘prompts’ as the primary interface.
We have deeply embedded a technology throughout our entire technological apparatus before we really understand it.”
I promise that it’s a juicy rant - read it here.
Update on my book Getting Started with ChatGPT and AI Chatbots
BCS Publishing is working night-and-day to rush my next book, Getting Started with ChatGPT and AI Chatbots: An introduction to generative AI tools on shelves ASAP. Publication is scheduled for 17 January 2024, but we’re aiming to get it out there (at least in electronic form) before the end of the year. Interested? Preorder my book.
Until next week,