Definitely more complicated. I've been playing around with using it to analyze historical data and using it to generate charts. And yes I've tried many different kinds of phrasing. I have experience working with and writing rules based "expert systems" and have a vague idea of how neural networks are used for image recognition. It's a pretty fun game to get useful information out of ChatGPT.
You cannot ask it to have crop yield as a column in a chart and get accurate information.
It only seems reasonable when doing a single list of items. Asking it for two columns of data and it starts making things up. Like bogus wikipedia links.
You could definitely make the argument I'm using it wrong but this is how people try to use it. I still find this useful because it gives me a start on where to point my research or ask clarifying questions.
It's much better at giving you a list of types of beer and wine that's been produced in history. Just don't trust any of the dates.
If you could share the actual prompts & info you wanted I would be curious to try and see if it is indeed too complex for it or if prompting differently would work better, because I've had it produce tables with multiple columns pulling info from different sources for different columns before so that's definitely not a hard limit... so would be happy to come back to you either with advice on how to do it next time, or with agreement that having tried it myself it is indeed ChatGPT not your prompting that was the problem.
Prompt:
I would like a list of east Indiamen from 1750 to 1800 where you can find how many tons burthen and how many crew. Show as a chart and give me the wikipedia links to the ships. Do not include any ships that do not have wikipedia links.
Here's my customization:
What do you do?:
Software Engineer
What traits should ChatGPT have?:
Show all the options
Be practical above all.
Anything else ChatGPT should know about you?:
I’m an author of science fiction and fantasy.
I like world building for stories.
I can’t decide whether I’m more tempted to feed it “Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere” as a prompt or try to see if it identifies Obra Dinn as an East Indiaman