What a clown. In what world do you require an LLM to check for duplicate pictures??
I mean, good on him for realizing that LLMs are dogshit. But still.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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A good journalist does not just write for themselves, they must also write for the audience as the audience. They are the readers proxy and ask questions on behalf of the reader.
Imagine a generic shmuck that has no idea ctrl +c and ctrl +v are hot keys.
Now. Do you think they have any concept of what type of duplication tools exist? Do you think they'd just want to use this "super cool everything" software that AI is billed as? After all, it's supposed to be smart right? They say it's the next best thing and it's almost like magic.
Look, I'm not saying it's a great article. But given all the bullshit hype regular people hear about AI. Is it really unreasonable to think "copilot, help me find duplicated files in my one drive" would be something good old Billy would try?
Maybe it's not a great article because there are better ways to de-duplicate photos. But that isn't the fucking point of the article. The article is "look at how AI still fucking fails at basic shit we expect it to be good at."
And for that, I thank the author. We need way more of that.
There are people who can't properly function without an llm. And it's not just a few, a good bunch of humans have decided to leave the reasoning skills to a chatbot so they don't have to do it.
There are people who can't properly function without an llm.
And I feel sympathy towards all of them, except the ones who appeared on the Jimmy Fallon Show to promote helplessness as a lifestyle.
This is both expected and mystifying at the same time.
How dead in the head do you have to be to RELY on such things?
I used to work as a software trainer at a big corporation. More than half don't understand file structures or keyboard hotkeys or can even distinguish a web browser from their file explorer.
Humans are historically pretty good at offloading mental capacity to some sort of tool in order to tackle larger and more complex problems. Consider solving a math problem mentally. Compare that to the kind of problem you would be able to some with a pen and paper. Then consider what you could do with a pen and paper and a calculator. An LLM purports to be all of that, and more, for any subject. It doesn't matter that the results are often horrifically wrong, once they've offloaded the entirety of their mental capacity to the magic box and refocused their attention somewhere else.
It's because people get mislead by the "agent", assuming there's something actually intelligent at the other end, able to act like they would, just... Automated.
This is because the advertising for LLMs present them as if they were intelligent.
LLMs are being promoted as a tool that can do anything even though the only thing they do well is output text that resembles human patterns. It is a hammer and they are pretending everything is a nail.
I think it's worse: it's laziness. It's easier to ask a machine so it does the job for you. And since it looks mostly ok, they keep doing it.
I suppose not everyone has the technical skills.
I’m well aware that there are “dedupe” services out there, but I’m still very leery of giving a third-party service access to the entirety of my cloud backups. So, when I saw that Microsoft now offers the ability to send Copilot agents into your OneDrive files (version 1.0!), I thought, hey, this was worth checking out. It was time for a good spring cleaning of my cloud storage.
If he was "leery of giving a third-party service access to the entirety of my cloud backups", why would he trust hallucinating and unpredictable software more than a deterministic and fully predictable software.
You just did the opposite of what would be a much safer option 🤦
Can any technically illiterate moron write articles for a pc magazine? Senior editor no less...
Differently types of risks. Giving a 3rd party access to your full cloud storage has massive privacy concerns that he is right to want to avoid.
AI is the tool of the lazy.
Nothing wrong with laziness. There are a small number of cases where it improves productivity. None I've found so far on my job, but I know people who use it effectively.
But anyone who gives an LLM access to do something that might be costly or risky to reverse is a drooling imbecile who shouldn't be allowed to eat soup without being watched by an attendant.
Took you a while, eh?
Meanwhile I saw a notification at work that they will roll out copilot.
We got that a while ago. More recently, we got instructions for how to disable it.