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Comment by nosianu

1 day ago

There was an HN topic less than a month ago or so where somebody wrote a blog post speculating that you end up with some people using AI to write lengthy emails from short prompts adhering to perfect polite form, while the other people use AI to summarize those blown-up emails back into the essence of the message. Side effect, since the two transformations are imperfect meaning will be lost or altered.

This is a plot point in a sci-fi story I'd read recently, though I cannot place what it was. Possibly in Cloud Atlas, or something by Liu Cixin.

In other contexts, someone I knew had written a system to generate automated emails in response to various online events. They later ran into someone who'd written automated processing systems to act on those emails. This made the original automater quite happy.

(Context crossed organisational / institutional boundaries, there was no explicit coordination between the two.)

Can anybody find the thread? That sounds worth linking to!

  • It was more than a month ago, but perhaps this one:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42712143

    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".

    The cartoon itself is the one posted above by PyWoody.