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Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

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Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#31

Post by renewiltord »

This is terrific stuff, honestly. I could see an Airtable integration being really quite useful. There were lots of times when I will run some quick scraping, some cleaning up via an Upworker, and then join against something else.

Here volume matters, and all misses are just lost data which I'm fine with. The general purpose nature of the tool makes it tremendous. There was a time when I would have easily paid $0.05 / query for this. The only problem with the spreadsheet setting is that I don't want it to repeatedly execute and charge me so I'll be forced to use `=GPT3()` and then copy-paste "as values" back into the same place which is annoying.

Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#32

Post by andreilys »

dzink wrote: post #28
skrebbel wrote: post #12

The amount of 90% sensible, 10% ridiculously wrong computer generated crap we’re about to send into real humans’ brains makes my head spin. There’s truly an awful AI Winter ahead and it consists of spending a substantial amount of your best brain cycles on figuring out whether a real person wrote that thing to you (and it’s worth figuring out what they meant in case of some weird wording) or it was a computer generat…

You got it! After seeing a few tweet storms and articles that turn out to be GPT3 gibberish, I end up coming to HN more for my news because usually someone flags waste of time in the comments. The software would save people 80% or the work and most are lazy enough to release it as is, instead of fixing the remaining 20%. That laziness will end up forcing legislation to flag and eventually ban or deprioritize all GPT…

How would you go about classifying something as GPT generated?

Let alone flagging/deprioritizing it via some draconian legislation?

Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#33

Post by johnfn »

skrebbel wrote: post #12

The amount of 90% sensible, 10% ridiculously wrong computer generated crap we’re about to send into real humans’ brains makes my head spin. There’s truly an awful AI Winter ahead and it consists of spending a substantial amount of your best brain cycles on figuring out whether a real person wrote that thing to you (and it’s worth figuring out what they meant in case of some weird wording) or it was a computer generat…

Idea: Use GPT-3 to identify GPT-3-generated snippets.

Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#34

Post by cstross »

Now wait for =deep_dream() or maybe =stable_diffusion() as a graph-generating function! (Graphs plotted with this function will of course zoom in infinitely but the further you go the more eyes and shiba dogs you'll notice in the corners ...)

Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#35

Post by bondarchuk »

andreilys wrote: post #32
dzink wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got it! After seeing a few tweet storms and articles that turn out to be GPT3 gibberish, I end up coming to HN more for my news because usually someone flags waste of time in the comments. The software would save people 80% or the work and most are lazy enough to release it as is, instead of fixing the remaining 20%. That laziness will end up forcing legislation to flag and eventually ban or deprioritize all GPT…

How would you go about classifying something as GPT generated? Let alone flagging/deprioritizing it via some draconian legislation?

By the fact that it was generated using GPT. Same way you would go about classifying something as e.g. not made with slave labour or made with a production process that follows environmental pollution rules. That you can't easily detect it from the end product is not necessarily an obstruction to legislation.

Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#36

Post by agf »

jedberg wrote: post #19
skrebbel wrote: post #12

The amount of 90% sensible, 10% ridiculously wrong computer generated crap we’re about to send into real humans’ brains makes my head spin. There’s truly an awful AI Winter ahead and it consists of spending a substantial amount of your best brain cycles on figuring out whether a real person wrote that thing to you (and it’s worth figuring out what they meant in case of some weird wording) or it was a computer generat…

It depends on how people use the tools. For example the thank you note one -- if someone just prints off the output of this and sends it, yeah, that's bad. But if someone uses this to do 90% of the work and then just edits it to make it personal and sound like themselves, then it's just a great time saving tool. I mean, in this exact example, 70 years ago you'd have to hand address each thank you card by hand from sc…

> But if someone uses this to do 90% of the work and then just edits it to make it personal and sound like themselves, then it's just a great time saving tool.

This is still way too optimistic. Reading through something that's "almost right", seeing the errors when you already basically know what it says / what it's meant to say, and fixing them, is hard. People won't do it well, and so even in this scenario we often end up with something much worse than if it was just written directly.

There is a lot of evidence for this, from the generally low quality of lightly-edited speech-to-text material, to how hard it is to look at a bunch of code and find all of the bugs without any extra computer-generated information, to how hard editing text for readability can be without serious restructuring.

Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#37

Post by adrianmonk »

camtarn wrote: post #25
Quarrelsome wrote: post #2

"lack of dark mode" should be "features" not "usability"?

Similarly, "Not sure what to do with the button" is clearly a usability issue, not features. And for the second Kindle review, it summarized one point from the actual review, then completely made up two additional points! Really impressive Sheets extension, but you'd have to be so careful what you applied this to.

> completely made up two additional points

I wonder if this means the AI is dumb or that the AI is smart enough to notice that humans just make shit up sometimes, like when they're not reading carefully or when they need filler.

Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#38

Post by lifthrasiir »

krossitalk wrote: post #15
ACV001 wrote: post #8

This particular example is an inadeqate application of AI. This is static data which can be looked up in a table (at least zip code).

What about subtle formatting differences (Country, Territory, Postal code is the norm. Doesn't have to be.). What if we applied this to hand written addresses? (Adding an OCR component). I'm sure the USPS is already doing this and more, and if not, there's probably some AI jobs lined up for it :)

Yes, USPS has Remote Encoding Centers (REC) to handle handwritten address that can't be recognized with OCR. So AI is already there, just that humans are for harder and tedious jobs ;-)

Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#39

Post by pfarrell »

johnfn wrote: post #33
skrebbel wrote: post #12

The amount of 90% sensible, 10% ridiculously wrong computer generated crap we’re about to send into real humans’ brains makes my head spin. There’s truly an awful AI Winter ahead and it consists of spending a substantial amount of your best brain cycles on figuring out whether a real person wrote that thing to you (and it’s worth figuring out what they meant in case of some weird wording) or it was a computer generat…

Idea: Use GPT-3 to identify GPT-3-generated snippets.

> Use GPT-3 to identify GPT-3-generated snippets.

I just lost the game.

Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature

#40

Post by PontifexMinimus »

skrebbel wrote: post #12

The amount of 90% sensible, 10% ridiculously wrong computer generated crap we’re about to send into real humans’ brains makes my head spin. There’s truly an awful AI Winter ahead and it consists of spending a substantial amount of your best brain cycles on figuring out whether a real person wrote that thing to you (and it’s worth figuring out what they meant in case of some weird wording) or it was a computer generat…

> The amount of 90% sensible, 10% ridiculously wrong computer generated crap we’re about to send

Agreed. Sooner or later a company is going to do this with its customers, in ways that are fine 95% of the time but cause outrage or even harm on outliers.

And if that company is anyone like Google, it'll be almost impossible for the customers to speak to a human to rectify things.

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