As part of the ongoing story, for example, a conversational interface for my grandmother might mean she needs to call me less often for iPad tech support. Microsoft took the same angle for a recent Copilot ad… which bizarrely showed Copilot offering the wrong instructions. Even as someone who viscerally hates “AI” getting stuffed into every aspect of every device and service I use, I can see places where it’s helpful.
Industry observers note that in a promotional X/tweet on November 12th, Microsoft showed YouTuber UrAvgConsumer pretending to be my not-so-tech-savvy grandmother, who says “Hey Copilot, I want to make the text on my screen bigger” while looking at Windows 11 Settings. “Can you show me where to click to do that?” he asks, activating the fresh Copilot Vision capability. Alright, let’s set up the dominoes before Copilot knocks them down.
As part of the ongoing story, when the user prompts Copilot with “Can you show me what to click next,” the system points him to the Scale setting. And when asked what percentage is needed, it says “Let’s start by clicking 150 percent, which is the recommended size”… which is baffling because 150 percent is already selected in the video as the default for that particular laptop. Copilot correctly highlights the Display portion of the menu.
Industry observers note that “Boom, and we’ve instantly got bigger icons, bigger text, easier for grandma to see.”. UrAvgConsumer apparently ignores the stated instructions and manually clicks on 200 percent instead.
Industry observers note that one, it’s pretty darn misleading since the audio of Copilot’s instructions doesn’t match the user’s on-screen actions. As Windows Central points out, Copilot told the user to essentially do nothing. The user—perhaps being more tech-savvy than Copilot’s limited system—correctly changes the setting to make the Windows UI bigger and easier to see. It’s probably something he’s done on his own dozens of times before. This is bewildering on many levels.
As part of the ongoing story, even someone like my grandma could fiddle with that percentage option until she found something she liked. But to continue in even-handed treatment, UI scaling isn’t quite the same thing as “making the text on my screen bigger.” A more relevant setting—especially for an older user—would be the Accessibility section of the same menu, where “Text size” is the very first item in that menu, complete with a slider and preview window that’d be even easier for a novice to understand… and wouldn’t re-scale the entire user interface. I’ll play devil’s advocate and point out that Copilot successfully guided the user to the relevant section of the Settings menu and the individual setting they needed.
The report highlights that this page is also the very first result on Bing if you search for “how to make text bigger in windows 11.” (I used Bing on the assumption that a novice user would be searching in Edge with no changes applied… which would still get better, faster, and more relevant results than using the LLM-powered Copilot.). This fact has been pointed out by Twitter users so often that it’s been automatically highlighted in the “Readers added context” section of the page, along with a link to an official Microsoft support page that even my grandma could find by searching the web.
In a fresh development, the very nature of large language models means that results for identical queries can be inconsistent and even flat-out wrong. But the fact that Microsoft would choose to highlight such a glaring failure of its own system, apparently in the presence of a very experienced technology influencer who applied a different change entirely, is incredibly strange. Copilot failing in such a basic way isn’t all that surprising.
The report highlights that assuming that UrAvgConsumer simply didn’t have the footage needed—possibly because this was a rapid-fire shoot for TikTok-style content—why not get the auto-generated Copilot audio to at least mention the 200 percent scaling option? Why would you choose to showcase something so glaringly wrong, specifically in an example of how that headline Copilot capability could help people? Why wouldn’t Microsoft’s promotional team just re-record that video until they got the desired outcome?
In a fresh development, that would be embarrassing for anyone using a publisher’s own products, especially one with billions of users like Windows, but marketing/PR and tech support are not the same job. Fine. It’s also possible that we’re missing bits of back-and-forth conversation that were edited out to make the video shorter. Maybe Copilot did instruct UrAvgConsumer to click on 200 percent off-screen. The most generous interpretation I can give of this situation is that it’s a result of marketers who aren’t that familiar with how Windows works for regular or advanced users.
According to the latest update, even so, it’s crazy to think that this made it through various levels of Microsoft bureaucracy to be put before eyeballs on Twitter and presumably other social services.
In a fresh development, on PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a fresh one for a review and building a fresh mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile Worldwide scene Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip. Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE.