The most sensible use for AI that I can see at this time is for supporting humans in their work, but only where the system is set up so that the human has to do the work first, with the AI system looking for possible errors. For example the human drives the car, and the AI brakes when it senses dangerous conditions ahead, or the human screens test results for evidence of cancer and the AI flags where it disagrees so that the human might take another look. The opposite scenario with AI doing the work and humans checking for errors as is the case here will lead to humans being over reliant on less than perfect systems and producing outcomes with high rates of error. As AI improves and gains trust in a field, it can then replace the human. But this trust has to come from evidence of AI superiority over the long term, not from companies over-selling the reliability of their AI.
Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
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Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
#82Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
#83The most sensible use for AI that I can see at this time is for supporting humans in their work, but only where the system is set up so that the human has to do the work first, with the AI system looking for possible errors. For example the human drives the car, and the AI brakes when it senses dangerous conditions ahead, or the human screens test results for evidence of cancer and the AI flags where it disagrees so…
I mostly agree. Happily, that's also what people will want as long as human participation is necessary. We'd generally prefer to write rather than correct an AI's writing, and prefer to drive rather than carefully watch an AI drive.
But when the AI is capable of something the person can't do (like Stable Diffusion creating images compared to me) the AI should take first chair.
Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
#84I said it before: we need Copilot flash fill. Infer what the user wants the output to be from patterns and labels, so they can enter a few examples and then “extend” and automatically do the equivalent of a complex formula. e.g. Formal | Informal Lane, Thomas | Tommy Lane Brooks, Sarah | Sarah Brooks Yun, Christopher | Doe, Kaitlyn | Styles, Chris | … Automating something like this is extremely hard with an algorithm…
I posed this exact question to character.ai's "Ask Me Anything" bot. It decided to redo the examples, too. The results:
> Lane, Thomas => Thomas Layne
> Brooks, Sarah => Sarah Brooksy
> Yun, Christopher => Chris Yun
> Doe, Kaitlyn => KD
> Styles, Chris => Chris Spice, Chris Chasm
I'm sure the bot overcomplicated an otherwise simple task, but I think there's always gonna be some creative error if we rely on things like that. It's funny though because these results are plausible for what a real person might come up with as informal nicknames for their friends.
Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
#85Do I understand that correctly? When I have to create a spreadsheet like this, there are 2 options. Option 1 I write a table zipcode to state and use this table to generate my column. If I carefully check my table my spreadsheet would be okay. Option 2 I ask GPT3 to do my work. But I have to check the whole spreadsheet for errors.
I dealt with something similar. I was creating a large directory of childcare centres in Canada. I had thousands of listings with a url but no email address. I created a Mechanical Turk job to ask turkers to go to website and find an email address. Many came back with email addresses like admin@ >.com. After checking a few, I realized that the turkers were just guessing that admin@ would work and I'd approve their wo…
I wonder if those workers can be reported and fired.
Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
#86Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
#87Of all the places spreadsheet is probably the one place you don’t want AI generated content. Half the time it’s financial info so sorta correct simply isn’t good enough
Spreadsheets are used for _waaaay_ more than just finances. I don't think it's anywhere near 50% finances. I can't recall where, but I saw a study from I think the 90s saying most of the spreadsheets they found were being used as Todo lists.
Maybe like 1 in my past 2y of many, many spreadsheets has been financing related. I think you might be overgeneralizing to an ungeneralizeably large group -- the set of all human spreadsheets.
Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
#88The tasks on the first sheet is easily accomplished by flash fill in MS Excel and I suspect less prone to error. Not sure why flash fill is not more popular
What is flash fill? I have worked a lot on Excel sheets and still haven’t heard anything about it.
Flash fill is an implementation of program synthesis, a technique invented by Sumit Gulwani formerly of Microsoft Research. Here's a paper that explains more about how it works [1]. It's not a very discoverable feature of Excel though [2]
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.03539.pdf [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/using-flash-fill-...
Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dealt with something similar. I was creating a large directory of childcare centres in Canada. I had thousands of listings with a url but no email address. I created a Mechanical Turk job to ask turkers to go to website and find an email address. Many came back with email addresses like admin@ >.com. After checking a few, I realized that the turkers were just guessing that admin@ would work and I'd approve their wo…
I wonder if those workers can be reported and fired.
I mean, depending on how the OP phrased the work to be done, they probably did valid work.
Re: Demo of =GPT3() as a spreadsheet feature
#90The most sensible use for AI that I can see at this time is for supporting humans in their work, but only where the system is set up so that the human has to do the work first, with the AI system looking for possible errors. For example the human drives the car, and the AI brakes when it senses dangerous conditions ahead, or the human screens test results for evidence of cancer and the AI flags where it disagrees so…
Humans are also less than perfect systems. Especially if they have to deal with monotonous tasks. A human might perform better on a 100 entries than an AI, but on 10 thousand? Of course you can distribute the workload, but you will balloon the costs (I'm talking about a future where GPT3 costs come down).
There must be a set of projects which are cost prohibited now due to having to pay humans but will become feasible exactly because of this tech. For a good portion of these, higher-than-human error rate will also be tolerable or at least correctable via a small degree of human intervention.