ChatGPT, the chatbot that made AI a household tool; not the first of its kind, yet a huge success in the field of generative AI.
Copilot, an AI assistant built into your browser; helping you in ways you couldn’t imagine AI ever would.
Both impressive and useful AI tools, the question, however, is which one is better?
Objectives:
If both are AI, how different are they really?
Copilot is Microsoft 365’s built-in AI assistant. It is available for use in your browser, and in many of your Office apps such as Word and Excel (amongst others).
Copilot is an excellent tool for those using Office apps on the daily, creating memos out of emails, and writing meeting notes makes Copilot the office’s first port of call. Appearing in the sidebar of Microsoft Edge, Copilot can provide you with quick summaries of web pages, or expand on the topic that appears on your screen.
Copilot is best used for professional purposes, as the detail and personalisation it can provide is at a higher level than that of ChatGPT. You can upload documents to Copilot and these documents will be used by the AI to fulfill specific requests.
ChatGPT was developed by Open AI and is the sister model to InstructGPT which was trained to follow instructions, it is a conversational model that works in a dialogue format; ChatGPT answers follow up questions, can admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect ideas, and reject inappropriate questions.
ChatGPT can be used for professional purposes, but the outcome would be more broad than what you could get from Copilot. However, ChatGPT can be used for personal and creative purposes. You can use ChatGPT to create plots for role-playing games, or interactive puzzles. ChatGPT can engage in what-if scenarios and is overall more useful for engagement and curiosity based requests.
Whilst ChatGPT can’t personalise requests to the extent that Copilot is able to, it has a more conversational element to it. ChatGPT encapsulates the fun of generative AI, able to bring your imagination to life in a way you may not have been able to, whereas Copilot is a much more business focused AI tool.
Integration; Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365’s Office apps, making it easy to access.
Increased productivity; with the ability to automate repetitive tasks for you, Copilot gives you more time to focus on other tasks and projects.
Collaboration; Copilot offers real-time suggestions on documents, as well as recommending meeting times based on your coworker’s schedules.
Cost; Copilot has high subscription fees, bundled with Microsoft 365’s premium plans, making it potentially inaccessible for some.
Dependency on Internet and Cloud; Copilot does heavily rely on Cloud services, making an internet connection a must-have. Any off-line work is either limited, or completely non-existent.
Training; adapting to an AI tool takes some time, and training is recommended so the tool can be used to its full potential.
Versatility; ChatGPT has a wide range of uses. Creative, professional, educational, and personal requests can all be fulfilled.
Cost; you can get versions of ChatGPT either for free or at a very low cost, making it more widely available.
Improved communication; ChatGPT can assist with grammar and punctuation, it can also provide help with formatting and structure. ChatGPT can write in a range of tones, so it has both personal and professional writing abilities.
Limited personalisation; despite the user's instructions, the request may not be fulfilled exactly how the user imagined. ChatGPT also struggles with remembering contexts and instructions when going from session to session.
Lack of emotion; AI lacks a human element, writing cannot be done with feeling, so many things can come across cold and robotic.
Reliability; ChatGPT can sometimes run on outdated information, so the user would have to fact-check often to ensure the information is up to date.
As with all AI tools, we find that heavy use of AI for jobs such as writing and data analysis can lead to the loss of these skills over time. Using AI to do jobs like writing tasks and presentation design may cause the users to become less creative over time. This is true for both Copilot and ChatGPT.
So, which AI tool is better? Well, it depends what you’re using it for!
If you are a working professional using the Microsoft 365 apps regularly and you’re looking for a tool to make those repetitive tasks automated, or to make writing that proposal easier, then Microsoft's Copilot is the AI for you.
However, if you are not a Microsoft user, and are just looking to explore the world of AI and maybe give your work a bit of a boost, then ChatGPT is the way to go!
by Josie Daniel | 16 Dec 24