I see choices that are similarly confusing in my very different industrial/manufacturing work, and I think I finally understand the motivation: Large organizati

I see choices that are similarly confusing in my very different industrial/manufacturing work, and I think I finally understand the motivation: Large organizations are very different from small ones. Large organizations seek to turn human labor into a commodity in order to reduce risk, they cannot rely on creativity or autonomy. At an individual or small-business scale, when you need to write a response to a recent event, you just have an intelligent human being with good communication skills write the email. Vanderbilt has 4,470 non-academic staff - which is a lot, and seems even larger when compared to 4,783 faculty, most of whom work in the med center. With more than 4000 staff, the organization doesn't want to trust that the ~~person~~ committee assigned to write the email (or their style editor, or copy editors, or the paralegal validating the email, or the administrator overseeing the process, etc. etc.) will do a good job. I'm not saying that those people aren't intelligent or don't have good communication skills, but they're not uniform, and Vanderbilt values reliability, uniformity, and risk mitigation differently than a small organization would. You write emails with ChatGPT not because any individual finds it easier than writing the email by hand, but because that's a way to write an email that can be made into a process, and followed step-by-step. It continues to work even if the entire staff is replaced. The emails will look the same whether they're generated by the senior editor, or by the intern. You don't need a "style guide" that's rigidly adhered to and defines whether the email should be written from a first-person perspective or second-person perspective.