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Copilot will also sometimes suggest other pieces of information you might want to add to the draft. The suggestions will appear just underneath the draft itself and may show prompts that might be as broad as asking if you want more details added or as granular as asking if you want to add the dimensions of a product for which you’re writing a marketing pitch.
5. Don’t be fooled by Copilot’s hallucinations
Copilot appears to be an all-seeing, all-knowing font of information, able to pull up the most arcane facts on request. That’s not the case, though. In truth, it’s more like a not-always-reliable, self-taught polymath who, when confronted with a question he can’t answer, makes something up in order to appear more knowledgeable than he really is.
That’s because Copilot, like all genAI, is subject to what AI researchers call “hallucinations” but the rest of us call lies. Every genAI lies, often with serious consequences. Take the example of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, who gave his own lawyer a group of legal citations to be used to convince a judge to free Cohen from the court’s oversight. Cohen used Google’s Bard AI to find them. But the citations were bogus — Bard hallucinated them.
Similarly, a lawyer named Steven Schwartz suing the airline Avianca for a client submitted a 10-page brief with more than half-a-dozen citations to a judge in support of the suit. The lawyer had used ChatGPT, the brains behind Copilot, to find the citations. ChatGPT hallucinated every single one of them. The New York Times has found a number of instances in which Bing Chat — the previous name for Copilot — hallucinated incorrect information it attributed to the Times.
Don’t let this happen to you. When you use Copilot, double-check important facts and citations before using them. Typically, genAI doesn’t lie about easy-to-find straightforward facts. Rather, it’s more often arcane facts or highly specialized information like law cases that you need to be concerned about. So make sure to verify if Copilot’s so-called facts are really facts. Copilot typically includes citations for where it found information. Follow the link to each citation — you may find links to nowhere, or you may find that a fact attributed to a source is nowhere to be found at that source.
Whatever you do, don’t ask Copilot to check those facts, because there’s a reasonable chance Copilot will say they’re true. That’s what happened to Schwartz. He asked ChatGPT to verify that the fake citations were real, and ChatGPT said they were. Instead, use a search engine and double-check the information yourself.
Also, if you want to make sure what you write is as accurate as possible, don’t use Copilot to write your final draft, because it could introduce a last-minute hallucination. Copilot’s output should always be used as a starting point, not final copy.
6. Check for Copilot plagiarism
Copilot sometimes has the opposite problem to hallucinations. Rather than make things up, it copies text verbatim — or nearly verbatim — from material it’s been trained on. That can be copyright infringement, whose use carries legal consequences. And even if there are no legal consequences, if you’re found violating copyrighted information at your workplace, you could be disciplined or be fired.
It’s difficult to know how often Copilot does this. But a New York Times lawsuit against Microsoft and ChatGPT cites several instances of ChatGPT, the brains behind Copilot, plagiarizing its articles, including a Pulitzer-Prize-winning, five-part 18-month investigation into predatory lending practices in New York City’s taxi industry. The suit charges: “OpenAI had no role in the creation of this content, yet with minimal prompting, will recite large portions of it verbatim.”
It can be tough to know when Copilot’s output plagiarizes copyrighted text. However, there are things you can do to reduce the risk. First, pay attention to the tone of Copilot’s answers to your prompts. Any sections that sound different from the rest or from its previous answers could signal a problem. Rewrite that section if you have any suspicions.
If you come across text you suspect might be plagiarized, copy a section of it into your search engine and do a search. That can find original text that Copilot has plagiarized. Also, follow the citation links at the bottom of Copilot’s response to you, read through them and see whether any text has been plagiarized.
You can also try using any of the many websites that claim they check for plagiarism. I’ve tried a number of them and have been underwhelmed by their usefulness. They’re generally good at finding obvious plagiarism — every one I tried was able to say with certainty that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was written by a human, not a genAI like Copilot. But you’d be able to do the same thing on your own. However, if you want to use them, here are two free ones to try: GPTKit and ZeroGPT, which is available for free only for personal use. This article tests and reviews ten free ones.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, don’t use Copilot’s answer verbatim and pass it off as your own. Consider its output a first draft, not a finished piece of work.
Note that Microsoft indemnifies users of paid versions of Microsoft’s commercial Copilot services (such as Microsoft 365 Copilot) against claims of copyright infringement. However, that offer doesn’t extend to the free versions of Copilot covered in this article.
7. “Think Deeper” with Copilot
Sometimes Copilot’s answers can have a once-over-lightly feel to them, especially if you’re asking it complex questions. Its Think Deeper feature can alleviate that. Based on ChatGPT’s o1 reasoning model, it breaks down questions into components and steps and provides a deeper dive into topics. Because of that, it takes extra time providing an answer, typically about 30 seconds or so.
To use Think Deeper, just click the Think Deeper button at the right end of the Copilot input box, then enter your query. When you’re done with Think Deeper, click the button again to turn it off.
Think Deeper provides a deeper dive into topics than regular Copilot results.
Preston Gralla / Foundry
Note that Microsoft appears to be in the process of rolling out Think Deeper across the various Copilot interfaces. My editor, for example, was able to use Think Deeper in the macOS Copilot app and via the web app, but it was not yet available in her Edge browser on macOS. If you find that it’s not available for you in one interface, try another.
In my tests, I found “Think Deeper” lived up to its billing. I asked both basic Copilot and the Think Deeper feature, “What is the best way for me to become a government contractor to sell my Work@Home office furniture to the federal government?” I then compared the answers. Copilot by itself offered useful if somewhat general advice, such as “Stay compliant with all federal contracting rules and regulations, including reporting and documentation requirements.”
Think Deeper gave a more useful answer with more specific advice, including “Ensure your furniture meets any relevant standards, like ANSI/BIFMA for safety and durability. Also, be mindful of the Trade Agreements Act (TAA), which requires products to be made or substantially transformed in the U.S. or designated countries.”
Keep in mind that just because the feature gives you deeper answers, it doesn’t mean they’re always right. So you should still check it for hallucinations. You may, however likely find fewer of them than if you’re using Copilot as your normally do.
8. Go back to previous Copilot conversations
There’s a good chance that at some point you’ll want to revisit a conversation you’ve had with Copilot. Although it seems as if they vanish once you close Copilot, that’s not the case. You can easily view a list of them and go back to any you’d like. You’ll first have to sign into your Microsoft account on Copilot if you want to do it.
To do it, click the View history button to the left of the Copilot input box — it’s an icon of a clock enclosed by a circular arrow. If you don’t see the View history button, click the Copilot logo to the left of the input box. The main interface will change to what Microsoft calls the Copilot home page, which offers up suggested chat topics. At the same time, the View history button will replace the Copilot logo on the entry bar.
You can access your chat history by calling up the Copilot home page and clicking the View history button.
Preston Gralla / Foundry
When you click View history, Copilot lists the most recent conversations, by day. They’re listed not by the specific prompt you used, but instead by a summary, such as “Selling to the federal government” or “Image request for woman working.”
In the pop-up list, click the title of the conversation you want to revisit, and you’ll be sent back to it. If you want to share the conversation with others, click the arrow to the right of the title. That brings up a popup. Click “Create & Copy Link” and you can send that link to someone else. You can also delete the conversation by clicking the trash icon to the far right of the title.
When you sign into Copilot, your conversations are saved and can be reviewed and revisited on multiple devices, such as a PC and an iPhone.
Preston Gralla / Foundry
You’ll be able to revisit conversations on any device on which you’ve signed into Copilot. Each device lists all conversation you’ve had on all your devices, if you’ve signed into them for the conversations.
In my tests, Copilot kept 10 months of conversations. But that may vary from person to person. When I asked Copilot how long it kept conversations, it responded, “I actually don’t have the specifics about how long your conversation history is kept,” and pointed me to a Microsoft privacy statement that did not have an answer, either.
9. Create and use images with Copilot
Copilot is not just a text-based chatbot. It can also create images and give you information about an image you upload to it, such as a photograph of a city. Its ability to create copyright-free images is particularly useful for those who need them for brochures, sales presentations, and other similar material.
You create images in the same way that you create drafts of documents. Start off by describing the image you want — for example, “Make an image of a woman sitting at a desk in her home office working on a computer.”
You can have Copilot make copyright-free images you can use in brochures, or for other purposes.
Preston Gralla / Foundry
As with creating text-based documents, the more information you provide, the better. Tell Copilot, for example, for what purpose you’ll be using the document. Describe the tone you want, such as formal, cozy, business-like, playful, and so on. Don’t settle for the first image. Keep asking Copilot to make changes until you have one you want. Once you’re happy with the image, download it by clicking the download button to the right of the image.
Keep in mind that the images Copilot creates tend to be highly idealized and have the feel of something created by AI, so you may need to continue to iterate until you have one that’s not quite so artificial-looking.
I’ve found that sometimes when you ask Copilot to create an image, it doesn’t display the image, but does display a download button. If this happens to you, click the download button — the image it created will be downloaded.
You can also ask Copilot to provide information about a photograph. To do that, copy it into Copilot and ask it to identify it for you and provide additional information. You can be as detailed as you like when asking the question.
This works well for most images. However, Copilot won’t identify photographs of people — guardrails have been put around that for privacy purposes.
Asking Copilot to identify a location.
Preston Gralla / Foundry
Bonus tip: Remove the Copilot icon from the Windows taskbar
Not everyone is a fan of AI. You may be among the people who don’t want to use it. Or maybe you just don’t like having the Copilot icon smack dab in the middle of your taskbar. If that’s you, you can remove the icon. Right-click it and select Unpin from taskbar. There’s no way to remove the Copilot icon from Edge, though.
This article was originally published in January 2024 and updated in March 2025.
