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> So if you’re a manager onboarding a new employee, Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome email. If you really can't b
by jon-wood 4y ago
> So if you’re a manager onboarding a new employee, Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome email.
If you really can't be bothered to write the welcome email maybe just don't, rather than throwing some ML generated drivel as the first impression a new hire gets of your management. The direction this is going in is so focused on automating away the hassle of email, with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other.
- shapefrog 4y agoAre you a new employee? Not sure how to reply to your welcome email your Manager sent? Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome reply email.
- noduerme 4y agoWell, since you never have to go into the office, you and the HR person can just hang out on your couches and let the AI assistants talk to each other. It's like the Jetsons, except hopeless and stoned.
- egman_ekki 4y agoFor just $3.99 per month, we can reply also to all the subsequent emails from your manager within 30 minutes! Just give us access to your private inbox and the emails will include your own personal style.
- neap24 4y agoAre you a manager whose new hire just sent a reply to your AI generated welcome email? Don’t have time to read it? Workspace auto-hides the text and just shows you a simple three-word summary.
- avereveard 4y agopremium version will show the manager just the prompt without the blurb.
- siva7 4y agoYou're joking but we all know here too well that exactly this will happen.
- 101008 4y agoThis. One million times this.
- Kiro 4y agoUpvote instead of posting noise like this.
- ihateyouall123 4y ago[flagged]
- pelasaco 4y agobut you don't earn karma from upvoting. People coming from reddit, do it all the time :)
- m3kw9 4y agoImagine someone made a slight mistake and receive: “Welcome to Google [Employee name] it’s nice to meet you
- derivagral 4y agoI've gotten templated recruiting emails with this bug. I wonder if an AI would spit this out, or something weirder as the name.
- Kiro 4y agoYou don't need to imagine. It's enough to have a LinkedIn to receive unprocessed templates like this where I would guess their scraper failed or something. On the contrary I don't think an AI would make the same mistake as easily.
- laurentlb 4y agoIt sounds like gmail should have a filter to detect this kind of problem (just like they have the detection for missing attachments). Use AI to solve problems caused by AI.
- m3kw9 4y agoExcept they likely think it isn’t generated, like a lot of plagiarism
- sourcecodeplz 4y agoNot exactly. These are your feelings because you know of A.I. and would rather not receive a canned message BUT not all people are the same. There are many who would appreciate that email and welcome it. Ignorance is not bliss.
- elicash 4y agoCan we not pretend people weren't already googling sample emails for this? It's just more efficient now to grab the same starter email that you then customize. Admittedly, google shouldn't be pretending otherwise, either. But what they also did was make it so you can get the starter email without having to see their ads. Edited to add: I think a better argument on this could he made about the "draft a thank you note to the team" example they give in the video. That's more the type of thing that should be personal and probably not from a starter template, googled or AI-generated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE But even here, the reality is people were googling for these starter emails already.
- neap24 4y agoSome were googling, for sure. But the best ones were not.
- melling 4y agoDown the rabbit hole with that… So, the best ones will still write their own and the others will save time. And by definition, most people aren’t the best. So, we all agree the automation is welcome?
- dymk 4y agoThe best ones know when to put in effort to show they care for another human being, and know when to automate a task where that doesn't matter. Welcoming somebody to a new job is the former.
- elicash 4y agoDoes it matter to you the extent to which an original template is then transformed?
- la64710 4y agoAnd you don’t need only the best to run a business.
- 4y ago
- Buttons840 4y agoThe middle manager thinks, "the time and effort I spend on my job can be automated, yay!", never considering the second order effects.
- reaperducer 4y agoThe middle manager thinks, "the time and effort I spend on my job can be automated, yay!", never considering the second order effects. This is why when a cashier at the supermarket tells me that instead of waiting in line I can use the self check-out lanes, I tell her "I don't want to help a robot take away your job." Usually they don't understand. But sometimes you can see them start to think about what's happening.
- phphphphp 4y agoThe cashier would rather you leave them in peace than hit them with the same tiresome self-congratulatory remark they hear day in day out. Please use the self checkouts instead.
- paganel 4y agoPlease don't use the checkout, why should corporations worth billions and tens of billions (I guess that's what Walmart is worth) get to outsource some of their work onto their clients?
- skidd0 4y agoAs a client, using the self-checkout is (usually) a choice I get to make. I choose to use the self-checkout because it is often faster than waiting in a line. I am thankful for the opportunity to put in my own effort in exchange for faster completion and reduced prices.
- noduerme 4y agoit's only faster because they fired half the employees and the other lanes are backed up.
- neilv 4y agoThat example is so bad, I'm not entirely sure some writer having a bad day didn't put it in as a cynical joke. Or are they working in an environment so steeped in insincerity that they don't even know what being genuine is, or that one of the most important things for a manager to do with things like a "welcome" is to be setting the tone. Nothing says welcome, and bring your genuine self, and trust colleagues, and feel intellectual safety, and invest in being a part of the team that's investing in you... than a new hire's manager can't even be bothered to say welcome themselves, and offloads it to a chatbot button instead. OTOH, this fits the sociopathic culture you'd expect, when you look at their hazing rituals, compensation levels, and promotion criteria. It just doesn't fit the culture some of us techies envisioned when that company was started.
- nashashmi 4y agoWe are going to hear a lot more of this kind of behavior from super talented and experienced people. But for the less experienced, AI is a starting point. And depending on the kind of person you are, the kind of upbringing you have, and the kind of education you got, you will be motivated to edit and improve what the AI gives you. The other thing I think this will help improve upon are those idiots and scumbags who give commands that are not very well thought out and then yell at talented people for not following instruction because they filled in the blanks with their own ideas. Giving it to an AI will show ridiculous their commands were. (sorry, end rant)
- indymike 4y agoWhat was the sci-fi book with "silvers" that were basically AIs that would handle administrata, set appointments and negotiate with each other for their humans?
- xezpeleta 4y agoGoogle FacePaLM :D
- DeathArrow 4y ago>with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other One can just hope that the ML entities won't start insulting each other. :)
- RobotToaster 4y agoThey'll just start getting progressively more passive aggressive. "Per my last e-mail"
- DeathArrow 4y agoUntil they escalate to ML Manager.
- balls187 4y agoI ask all new hires to ghost write a short intro. They would essentially tell me some facts that I would then re-write for them, so why not just use their own words. If they want to use generative AI, that’s on them.
- PaulWaldman 4y agoIs this really that different than traditionally delegating tasks to other humans?
- v3ss0n 4y agoWell I wrote onboarding message, guidelines and policies all in ChatGpt
- mrtksn 4y agoMaybe the manager AI and Employee AI can generate each other responses and the actual humans can have a 1:1 free of the formalities? Humans are amazing in breaking the system for convenience and profit.
- Veen 4y agoIn an ideal world, it would be lovely if managers wrote copperplate welcome notes on the finest perfumed paper, but they don't. They copy and paste a template or use a tool like Text Expander. This just makes the process slightly more convenient.
- politician 4y ago> with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other. The end-state is an ML model running on a client device in isolation. Why bother using SMTP?
- SergeAx 4y agoOnboarding email should be just a template. Or, even better, a small template with a link to bigger template. As a manager, you should demonstrate your empathy in a welcome 1:1 meeting.
- amelius 4y agoIt's not a problem as long as the sender reads the email and agrees with it before it is sent.
- adverbly 4y agoSeriously! If the content of your email could have been generated using an AI trained on publicly available information, it necessarily must not include anything private. Which means you are spam messaging your new hires with messages that contain zero actual information! Noise is a word that does not even properly capture the uselessness of such communications. I swear, many humans seem to just want filler text to put places, and they just keep shoving it there. Anyone read blindsight by Peter Watts? Spoiler alert: an entire science fiction book written around the fact that sending useless information to hyperintelligent beings could be interpreted as an intentional distraction and therefore a threat.
- Maxion 4y agoI recommend trying out GPT3 and now the new released GPT4. Using them to collaboratly write correspondence is eye opening. You use ai as a tool, you prompt it, change its results and feed it back. A little work gives you impressive results way faster than if you wrote the whole thing yourself
- misnome 4y agoBut... you didn't write it yourself. And it's not anything you would write yourself. This is fine if you never want to ever write something yourself, ever again. I'd much rather retain that skill.
- Maxion 4y agoConsider the relationship between a writer and an editor in a newspaper setting. The writer creates the content, while the editor reviews and refines it to ensure it aligns with the publication's standards and style. The editor's input can help improve the overall quality of the piece without taking away the writer's original ideas and skills. In a similar manner, using AI tools like GPT-3 or GPT-4 can be likened to having an AI editor that assists you in the writing process. By working together with the AI, you can maintain your writing skills while also benefiting from the AI's ability to generate content quickly and suggest new ideas. Just as a writer doesn't lose their skill by working with a human editor, collaborating with an AI editor can enhance your writing without diminishing your abilities. The key is to find the right balance between using AI for assistance and retaining your personal writing skills, just as a writer and editor strike a balance in their collaboration at a newspaper. This comment was written in collaboration with ChatGPT.
- barbazoo 4y agoTrue. I thought the same for the other example, writing a job description. I thought "WTF" now job postings are going to be even more useless.
- jsharf 4y agoAt the end of the day, you're still responsible for reading the email before you send it. I don't think it matters how the email was written. I think the final content matters more. There's many ways to prompt an AI, both carelessly and with extreme attention to detail. For example, I typed this message. But I'm sure with careful massaging, I could get an AI to write the same thing, word-for-word. The laziness you're referring to probably happens even if the manager is typing the email out themselves.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- keraf 4y agoIt will probably save you time too with layoff emails trained using Google's internal data.
- throwaw12 4y ago> If you really can't be bothered to write the welcome email maybe just don't not everyone has good english and corporate writing skills.
- cmarschner 4y agoThis is hilarious. The point of a task like a welcome email is that they _take effort_. I can’t help but think that an example like this shows how far Google has become like Microsoft in the 2000s. A bunch of rich, middle aged managers that have spent too long in the alphabet soup.