How the Copilot hallucinated Christmas

Scaling up a recipe for a massive gathering is a common holiday practice in my Italian American family. I tried showing Copilot a recipe for stuffed mushrooms from Sip and Feast. It acknowledged that to go from a serving size of six to 14 would require multiplying each ingredient by about 2.3 times, but it usually only did a couple calculations before expecting me to do the rest or trying to move on to another topic by asking me a question. When it noticed the site had options for scaling up the recipe, it mistook the “2x” and “3x” buttons for plus and minus ones that would let me dial in exactly 14 servings, and kept insisting that’s what those buttons are for. They aren’t. Then, as a last-ditch effort, I asked it to just calculate each ingredient and spell it out for me in a document. Copilot told me it would, and then did nothing.