Comment by bambax
3 days ago
How is AI in email a good thing?!
There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
It's true: Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?
There's a trend of people replying to posts/tweets/etc. with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'
It's the modern equivalent of LMGTFY. The OP could just as easily written the same prompt themselves. The difference is that LMGTFY was an expression of irritation, smugness and hazing. The ChatGPT reply is just garrulous laziness. I expect and hope we'll develop social rules that mean this type of reply will be seen as passe.
At least a sarcastic LMGTFY got the person closer to an answer if they clicked the link. Asking ChatGPT is a dead-end.
The last time I got one of those lazy ChatGPT responses I wanted to just ban the person on the spot if I had moderator privileges. Just pages of dreck that looked like detailed information but was totally useless and a waste of time. I don't have a problem if people use ChatGPT and find it helpful, but it's hugely disrespectful to just copy and paste its output to other people without even a cursory review of it first.
Even worse is making an original post starting with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'
Yes, when I see something written by AI I don't read it. Its a waste of time.
That distinct feeling when reading AI is as if someone who wrote it was compelled to write more words
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Cold emails -- especially AI generated ones -- go directly to the trash in my mailbox.
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This is untenable. I could be AI. You could be AI. The whole idea of value is going to change when there is 99.99% noise from AI, and genuine human created content will be hard to distinguish if at all.
My expectation is that:
1: people will use ChatGPT to write their formal emails based on a casually written text 2: people will use ChatGPT to convert their emails from formal text to summaries\ 3: this will get automated by email providers 4: eventually the automation will be removed and we'll just talk in plain language again
I do #1 and it's great. I'm not sure why folks in this thread are sneering at what is a working English transpiler. I don't get to choose having to write formally at work sometimes but I can control how I deal with it.
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It is funny but it is genuinely a enormous waste of energy and money.
You can run it through AI to summarize it down to a sentence or two. It's like the telephone game but with computers.
I'll buy the AI LLM that finds the prompt that was used based on the output, and replaces posts and emails by their prompt so I can actually understand the intention of the author and not spend my whole afternoon going through all bullet points with highly redundant information.
/s, of course, but not that unrealistic.
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We’ve invented the worlds dodgiest decompression algorithms
Then why did you even write more than two sentences in the first place, if nothing else matters? Why didn't you write a summary-line at the beginning, consisting of two sentences?
AI will not replace human thinking, even though many people seem to believe and put their brain on stand-by.
It feels like someone wants to transport water from A to B and transports it as steam, just because _we can _.
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My email is disliked due to its brevity, turning the single clear and concise sentence of into a multi paragraph treatise might just lead to promotions, raises and bonuses which I can trickle down through the economy.
I think this underrates how many emails are literally just replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in gmail
A reply of "sounds good" means the initial email has been read and its contents agreed upon. Ho would AI improve upon this?
- sending "sounds good" even when the recipient hasn't, in fact, read the initial email => catastrophic alternative
- writing an elaborate email explaining in luxurious details why it in fact sounds good => not catastrophic, but costing time on the other side to read and understand, with zero added value
it would be the delivery of the information and its context in the whole of your other content analyzed
Sounds good.
Email is a dated form of communication, that's why every other message platform will let you just like and heart stuff.
It's a paper trail for me. Companies, as we saw recently, can do whatever they want on company chat platforms. Emails are nearly impossible to fully delete if they ever have to escalate to a lawsuit, and can (YMMV based on policy) let you BCC important trails to your personal email.
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"serious business" and "serious stuff" still happens over email, and in the same way, even "more serious business stuff" happens over snail mail still.
Well, Microsoft did add "reactions" to Outlook and has been universally hated for it.
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I conduct all of my business either in person, via email, or by phone. I use email when I want a paper trail.
I have 5000+ unread items.
I've skimmed maybe 50% of them, but not enough to consider them "read". It's 99% bullshit. Even legitimate email is spam these days.
I'm too busy with other fake work to need to additional fake work managing pointless email comms.
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Outlook now lets me like and heart emails, which feels weird but there it is.
Proton has a nice feature for writing emails.
They specifically allow you a grammar/spell check and also change tone (formal/informal) and length. Length one I have never used but the grammar spell check is a godsend that I use almost always.
You're aware we've had grammar/spell check since (checks) 1961 right? It's built right into your operating system.
Yes, I'm aware. What AI/Proton provides isn't just a simple spellchecker though. It specifically recommends and alters wording to better suit the overall sentence structure. Essentially, it considers the context better than any built-in checker I've had in the past.
It's also really useful to for words that are spelt almost the same. Suit and Suite for example.
Also throughout my day, I'm constantly switching between 2 languages that have almost identically written words. Adress and Address. The normal spellchecks often don't mark it as an error because my computers and browsers naturally also have 2 installed keyboards and languages.
Maybe you aren't in a space where it would be useful, but not everyone who has to write an email is a great and concise writer.
I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy and they had to write emails and some of them were very poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great deal in providing information but also being able to understand what was coming back to them.
I worked with engineers daily for around 40 years and now I work with trades people daily. In general the trades people are better communicators.
Formal writing is just that.
Alice: Hey, Bob, I finished the job, pay me
Letter: Blah blah blah, Bob, blah blah blah, $$$, blah blah blah
Bob: Oh, Alice is done, hey Charlie, pay her
Letter: Blah blah blah, Charlie, blah blah blah, Alice, blah, $$$, blah blah
Charlie: Ok, Alice is paid
Letter: Blah blah, Alice, blah blah, $$$, blah blah, bank account, blah
Alice: kthx
Letter: Blah blah blah...
I like this version of the same joke (unfortunately no idea what the source is): https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...
Found it: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
It almost can't be a good thing. LLMs are only useful when given all the relevant context. When you write an email, the context is mostly in your head.
It isn't, though; it's in all the meetings that happened beforehand and all the documents around them.
The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to summarize what happened.
Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it—and gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite.
Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal when everyone has access to it.
What big model do/did you use?
> gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite
What does that mean? That they got help, if they found the tech too complicated?
> Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal
Has this changed how people behave (yet)?
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My experience with LLMs expanding on bullet points is that they often enough misrepresent my intentions as a writer. Often in infuriatingly subtle ways.
Same when summarizing, just less frequently.
As someone who cares about precision and clarity in my writing, I do not use LLMs in the context of communication.
If you're a non native speaker trying to get the tone just right with recipients whom you don't know, it's invaluable.
Sometimes I would spend 15 minutes writing a 3 or 4-line email of this kind. Not anymore.
> How is AI in email a good thing?!
> There's a cartoon going around (...)
Both frames of the cartoon represent a real perceived need: for the sender, the need to inflate the message to "look nice" because "people expect it", and then for the recipient, the need to summarize the nice-looking message to get the actual point they care about.
Hopefully the use of AI in email will make that cartoon (and the underlying message) widespread, and lead to people finally realizing what they failed to realize all these decades: just send the goddamn bullet point. We don't need AI in e-mails. We just need to stop wasting each other's time.
EDIT: and riffing off rpigab's comment downthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 -- I wish for the future people will feel comfortable, instead of sending AI-generated e-mails, to send the goddamn prompt instead. It carries all the information and much less noise.
I mean, using LLMs makes sense if you actually need to communicate in prose - for many, myself included, it's much easier to evaluate whether some text sounds right, than to write it that way in the first place, so LLMs are useful in evolving and refactoring your own writing (and learning how to write better from it, over time). But that is rarely the case in transactional or business communication - for that, just send the prompt.
Google seems to have an advantage here; as the client on both ends in many emails, they could just check if this ai expand/summary process is occurring and if so just send the bullet point (or if they want to be really clever just pass the bullet point through a thesaurus, so nobody will notice even if the sender happens to see what the recipient got).
Oh boy the future is so underwhelming.
Given how much compute these models take to run, I don't think there's any value in that.
Do you happen to have a link for that comic?
Not the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics.
https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
Yes, that's the one.
hah that is wonderful. thank you.
what are people even worried about here? they're just trying things to see whether they're useful. don't expand your emails into long prose if it adds no value for you and they will focus on other things.
This is so funny I screamed laughed just reading over it XD
someday 99% of all computing power is going to be used to generate and summarize vast amounts of text.
The most inefficient protocol of the internet.
This was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :D
Really? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?
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