Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is the most accessible free LLM on the market — you can use it without creating an account, and it runs GPT-4 class models with built-in web search. For journalists, the web-grounded responses with source citations are genuinely useful for initial research, background checks, and summarization. It won't hallucinate as much as base GPT because it's pulling from indexed web pages and citing them. The free tier is generous enough for daily use. The image generation is a bonus but not journalism-critical. Where Copilot gets interesting (and expensive) is the Microsoft 365 integration — Copilot in Word, Excel, and Outlook transforms how you work with documents, data, and email. At $30/user/month for business plans, it's a real budget line item, but for newsrooms already paying for Microsoft 365, the incremental value is high. The privacy story is better than most: Microsoft explicitly states that personal conversations aren't used to train models, uploaded files are deleted after 30 days, and enterprise plans include full data protection commitments. The catch is that you're giving Microsoft your prompts, your documents, and your research patterns — and Microsoft is a company that cooperates with law enforcement. For routine journalism work, this is fine. For sensitive investigative research, use a local model instead. Compared to ChatGPT: Copilot's free tier includes web search (ChatGPT charges for this), but ChatGPT's paid tier has better reasoning models and more customization.