That lines up with my experience- for high-stakes decisions, they rarely give me a great answer. But for low stakes decisions, they do well at giving me a good enough answer. For example, I've been using them to help find gifts for friends and children this month. I don't need the best choice to solve the problem, just a good one.
How much additional calculation occurs in high-stakes decisions by individuals. Also what is the variability in quality of high stakes decisions in humans?
I'm guessing LLM decision is rather average, but that the LLM has no easy way of spending the extra time to gather information around said high stakes decisions like a human would.
A random sampling of things GPT-4 has helped me with lately:
Where are the dates in whole foods? (A: with nuts, not fruits and veggies)
How can I steam bao without a steamer basket? (A: saucepan, 1" water, balled up aluminum foil, plate, baos, lid)
Any guess as to when this photo was taken? It looks like anywhere from the 70s to the 90s. (A: the photo paper has a logo that postdates a 2003 company merger)
Generating content for tabletop gaming with my friends (especially wacky ideas, like character names themed after items on the Taco Bell menu)
I had to buy some spare tools where I cared more about price than quality and it helped me choose some suitable brands
As mentioned, you can tell it a bit about a person (and feed in their wishlist if they have one) and it'll help you pick something they'll probably like
Finding something to do to spend an afternoon in a city while traveling
In general, anything where there is no objective best answer (meaning I can ask it to generate multiple possibilities and filter out the bad ideas) and where I value speed over correctness.
> Generating content for tabletop gaming with my friends (especially wacky ideas, like character names themed after items on the Taco Bell menu)
I've been going ham with this. Pay for ChatGPT Plus for work, so GPT-4's been helping me design encounters, plan sessions, and brainstorm ideas for one-shots. It gives me a sort of bland, vanilla idea for something, I suggest a twist on it, it goes, "oh great idea, here that is with your changes:" and I iterate with it from there.
Likewise I love theming characters, plotlines, and settings after songs, bands and albums, so I'll dump in a bunch of lyrics and ask ChatGPT to help me intertwine subtle references into descriptions, names, and plot points.