Yeah, the examples in the article are terrible. I can be direct when talking to my boss. "My kid is sick, I'm taking the day off" is entirely sufficient.
But it's handy when the recipient is less familiar. When I'm writing to my kid's school's principal about some issue, I can't really say, "Susan's lunch money got stolen. Please address it." There has to be more. And it can be hard knowing what that needs to be, especially for a non-native speaker. LLMs tend to take it too far in the other direction, but you can get it to tone it down, or just take the pieces that you like.
>When I'm writing to my kid's school's principal about some issue, I can't really say, "Susan's lunch money got stolen. Please address it." There has to be more.
Why?
I mean this sincerely. Why is the message you quoted not enough?
The whole article is about AI being bullied into actually being direct
Yeah, the examples in the article are terrible. I can be direct when talking to my boss. "My kid is sick, I'm taking the day off" is entirely sufficient.
But it's handy when the recipient is less familiar. When I'm writing to my kid's school's principal about some issue, I can't really say, "Susan's lunch money got stolen. Please address it." There has to be more. And it can be hard knowing what that needs to be, especially for a non-native speaker. LLMs tend to take it too far in the other direction, but you can get it to tone it down, or just take the pieces that you like.
>When I'm writing to my kid's school's principal about some issue, I can't really say, "Susan's lunch money got stolen. Please address it." There has to be more.
Why?
I mean this sincerely. Why is the message you quoted not enough?
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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.