this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
868 points (99.0% liked)
iiiiiiitttttttttttt
1272 readers
512 users here now
you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
A community for memes and posts about tech and IT related rage.
founded 6 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
IIRC, you're supposed to also pass a range of cells for the "AI" to work on.
But the fact that it just returned a number rather than "You're using this wrong, dickhead" is a problem in itself.
And if you have to supply the range then it's even less useful than the sum function
Turns out this is exactly the problem with SPSS, which dates to 1968.
Passing the range is optional, as per the documentation. However, when used with a separate range parameter, it does return correct results. Note that specifying a range inside the text prompt will not work, even though it should be the exact same request sent to the model.
I'm not sure what the intended purpose for this is, but it can return crazy numbers when doing math. You can ask it to add some cells in a completely empty spreadsheet and it'll return some random numbers.
Yeah, plenty of warnings in there about not using it for numbers.
And also this:
So it's optional only in that it won't even look at the spreadsheet when returning the result. I suspect the next 20 years of AI research will be teaching it to say "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" when appropriate.