Comment by pizzathyme
1 day ago
If that's the case, you can easily only write messages to your wife yourself.
But for the 99 other messages, especially things that mundanely convey information like "My daughter has the flu and I won't be in today", "Yes 2pm at Shake Shack sounds good", it will be much faster to read over drafts that are correct and then click send.
The only reason this wouldn't be faster is if the drafts are bad. And that is the point of the article: the models are good enough now that AI drafts don't need to be bad. We are just used to AI drafts being bad due to poor design.
I don't understand. Why do you need an AI for messages like "My daughter has the flu and I won't be in today" or "Yes 2pm at Shake Shack sounds good"? You just literally send that.
Do you really run these things through an AI to burden your reader with pointless additional text?
100% agree. Email like you’re a CEO. Saves your time, saves other people’s time and signals high social status. What’s not to like?
MY CEO sends the "professional" style email to me regularly - every few months. I'm not on his staff, so the only messages the CEO sends me are sent to tens of thousands of other people, translated into a dozen languages. They get extensive reviews for days to ensure they say exactly what is meant to be said and are unoffensive to everyone.
Most of us don't need to write the CEO email ever in our life. I assume the CEO will write the flu message to his staff in the same style of tone as everyone else.
2 replies →
Being so direct is considered rude in many contexts.
The whole article is about AI being bullied into actually being direct
6 replies →
It's that consideration that seems to be the problem.
Oh come on it takes longer to work out how to prompt it to say it how you want it then check the output than it does to write a short email already.
And we’re talking micro optimisation here.
I mean I’ve sent 23 emails this year. Yeah that’s it.
They are automatically drafted when the email comes in, and you can accept or modify them.
It’s like you’re asking why you would want a password manager when you can just type the characters yourself. It saves time if done correctly.
I can't imagine what I'm going to do with all the time I save from not laboriously writing out "2PM at shake shack works for me"
How would an automated drafting mechanism know that your daughter is sick?
1 reply →
> But for the 99 other messages, especially things that mundanely convey information like "My daughter has the flu and I won't be in today", "Yes 2pm at Shake Shack sounds good", it will be much faster to read over drafts that are correct and then click send.
It takes me all of 5 seconds to type messages like that (I timed myself typing it). Where exactly is the savings from AI? I don't care, at all, if a 5s process can be turned into a 2s process (which I doubt it even can).
How would an AI know if "2pm at Shake Shake" works for me? I still need to read the original email and make a decision. The actual writing out the response takes me basically no time whatsoever.
An AI could read the email and check my calendar and then propose 2pm. Bonus if the AI works with his AI to figure out that 2pm works for both of us. A lot of time is wasted with people going back and forth trying to figure out when they can meet. That is also a hard problem even before you note the privacy concerns.