It is "addictive" in the sense that it works really well, and has some guardrails so the risk of it doing something insane is minimized. I have done some cool stuff with it!
>Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling “ClawPilot,” since March. ClawPilot—and now Scout—are part of “Project Lobster,” which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use.
Given Microsoft's long history of failure with personal assistants I'm looking forward to this one! Clippy, Cortana, Copilot! Wasn't an animated dog called rover one of these way back? The best of all was unquestionably Ms. Dewey for Microsoft Windows Live Search who is almost forgotten.
Edit: I was wrong. But there is "Power Pup" and apparently Will Shakespeare
(I was way too into the building apps with the assistant framework as a kid...)
You can go straight to hell for making me feel old.
Anyone who makes products want users of our product to keep coming back as though they are addicted, but not actually addicted.
Can you explain the distinction? I am not seeing it. If I keep refreshing a product page to get another dopamine hit, am I addicted or not addicted but appearing so to your metrics?
Brewers want people to want beer, and to perhaps puritans, that desire could appear as “addicted”. However, brewers don’t want addicts - liver failure, destitution, death, are all things I doubt a brewer wants to see in their consumer base because you can’t drink if you don’t have a liver, don’t have money, or don’t have life.
Did I, as a child, think my dad was addicted to alcohol because I saw him drink everyday? I did, that’s the appearance it gave. Was he? Not to the clinical point of addiction, technically - he functioned, maintained relationships and a job, and wasn’t more than occasionally emotionally abusive. He fit the type of customer GP seems to talk about - appearing to be addicted but not wholly, truly addicted.
https://microsoft.ai/news/towards-humanist-superintelligence...
In an otherwise pleasant, humanist framing, they jarringly conclude Microsoft's primary AI application will be putting people into parasocial AI relationships for profit.
I'm confused and dissapointed that this isn't called Copilot, the users want more things to be called copilot even if they aren't related to each other, consider renaming Scout to Copilot, or at least Scout Copilot, or even better Copilot* (*Copilot Scout)
Although maybe it doesn't take much, given that it sounded at one point like the Microsoft execs were addicted already.
Once you're thinking about how to keep a user coming back, you're in the mutually adversarial design space, whatever language is used to more pleasantly redecorate that reality.
thewebguyd•57m ago
yieldcrv•51m ago
damn, he quickly disavowed the statement and got panned anyway
would falling on the sword worked better??
lepus•43m ago
phatskat•8m ago
sumeno•28m ago
quantified•18m ago