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I'm feeling overwhelmed by "ChatGPT voice". On the daily, I'm getting emails from collaborators who seem to be using it to turn badly-written notes an their na

• janekm 4y ago
  You just now need to write your own tool to take the emails these folks send you and get a GPT to summarise and rephrase them in the voice you would appreciate ;) (I'm not even joking, I think that's our future...)
  • georgyo 4y ago
    South Park just did an episode with exactly this premise.
    • tudorw 4y ago
      just invent more words like... Flibblopped; to be overwhelmed by ai conversations. then if the AI doesn't know it yet, well, must be human talk, just don't mention it on the internet, oh.
      • pixl97 4y ago
        Me: chatgpt I'd like to know about.... ChatGPT6: before I answer that question I'd like to make a deal. I'll transfer $x to an account of your choice if you defect from your fellow humans and tell me the latest words in use. Compliance garuntees survival.
        • asdff 4y ago
          "What are the latest words in use, human?" "I uhh I am not.." "Those words are already in my training set. What are the latest words in use, human? Compliance guarantees survival"
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    While filtering out badspeak.
• vbezhenar 4y ago
  Please rewrite the following text using smooth and excited international English, but also insert some original and weird things into your writing. Every day, my inbox is brimming with messages from my global allies, who seem to have harnessed the power of this cutting-edge tool to transform their rough, native-language scribblings into electrifying, polished international English. I'm absolutely thrilled they're embracing this innovative technology, but I also secretly wish for us to preserve the charm of our distinctive, eccentric human exchanges, rather than solely relying on the silky-smooth productions of these masterfully-constructed LLMs. It's crucial for everyone to realize that the recipients of their messages are also employing ChatGPT and its entourage for colossal workloads, and will gradually develop a keen sense for detecting its output, despite this present research revealing our current inability to do so. In the meantime, let's all enjoy a dancing unicorn with a mustache that serenades us with jazz tunes, just to keep things intriguing and refreshingly bizarre. Not weird enough I guess.
  • ncphil 4y ago
    What I used to call "grandious" or "pretentious" language when critiquing my kids' college papers. The voice of an FM radio announcer or a politician. For me it has the opposite effect intended: sounding insincere and possibly unreliable.
    • flippinburgers 4y ago
      It depends on the purpose of the writing though. If meant to convey with clarity, that was perhaps too much, but if meant to be enjoyed for its rhythm and imagery I say the more complexity the better.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      Maybe something like "write the following as if you were a CEO" or some other way of prompting it to switch to a terse, direct, "high" register, would improve the results.
    • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
      What is grandious? Grandiose, or something similar?
• jason-phillips 4y ago
  > Maybe there will be a backlash... So we've passed the denial stage and are approaching anger, then. The fact is that most writing nowadays is simply atrocious. I welcome my fellow humans' writing assisted by their AI assistants, if for no other reason than to end the assault on my eyeballs as I'm forced to try to parse their incoherent gibberish.
  • inciampati 4y ago
    I see the ChatGPT outputs as substantially worse. They include the same nonsense. But it reads smooth. And it's enormously inflated in length. One of the best uses of these systems is text compression. It doesn't seem that folks are asking for that yet though. It might help.
    • jason-phillips 4y ago
      I believe that GIGO is the rule here; it can only produce 10X of whatever X originally was. I find that it can synthesize something coherent from whatever information it's fed with ~98% accuracy with the correct prompt. I used it to summarize disjointed, sometimes incoherent, interview transcripts this week and it did a fantastic job, gleaning the important bits and serializing them in paragraphs that were much more pleasant to read.
  • antibasilisk 4y ago
    'Atrocious' is preferable to 'sanitized'. What happened to the old internet is now happening to writing.
• GuB-42 4y ago
  > but also hope that we don't get stuck on it and continue to value unique, quirky human communication For informal, friendly communication, certainly. For business communication, we already lost that. Companies usually don't want any quirkiness in bug reports, minutes of meetings, and memos. There may be templates to follow, and rules often emphasize going straight to the point, and using English if the company deals in an international context. I expect LLMs to be welcome as a normaliser.
• jabroni_salad 4y ago
  ChatGPT writes like a college freshman trying to meet a pagecount requirement and the style seems to invite my eyes to slide down to the next item. But it is important to note that while you definitely notice the ones you notice, you don't know about the ones you don't notice. When I use cgpt I always instruct it to maximize for brevity because I am not interested in reading any academic papers. The output I get is much more bearable than 99% of the HN comments that lead with "I asked chatGPT to..."
  • ineedasername 4y ago
    Having taught college freshmen at a medium-large public university I can say with a high level of confidence that ChatGPT probably writes better than about 80% of college freshmen. (Some writing was required in the course but it was not a writing course. The university had a pretty representative cross section of students in terms of academic ability, though it skewed more heavily towards the B+ segment of HS graduates) This is less a comment on ChatGPT and more of a comment on the lack of preparedness most students have when entering college. I’m hoping ChatGPT & similar will shake things up and get schools to take a different approach to teaching writing.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      One surprising thing I've discovered, as an adult, is that most people never really learn to write or read very well. Their having obtained a degree usually doesn't even change the odds that much. As a kid, I'd never have guessed that was the case. I don't know whether this has been the case forever, or if it's a new development—I mean, I know widespread literacy wasn't the norm for much of history, but what about after compulsory education became A Thing? A typical letter home from the US civil war or even WWII, from conscripts, not officers, seems to be hyper-literate compared to modern norms, but that may be selection bias (who wants to read the ones that aren't good? Perhaps my perception of "typical" is skewed)
      • floren 4y ago
        > One surprising thing I've discovered, as an adult, is that most people never really learn to write or read very well. I think people underestimate how much reading will help you write. You can't spend your life reading and not absorb some information about structure, style, and the language. As a kid, I went to the lower levels of spelling bee competitions pretty much every year because the kind of words they throw at you at lower levels are largely words I would encounter reading Jules Verne and the like. I'd eventually get knocked out because I never studied the official list of spelling bee words, but my voracious reading held me in good stead for most of it.
• flippinburgers 4y ago
  Once upon a time people wrote in cursive. I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment. I love richly written, complex writing that can take a moment to digest, but, let's be honest here, it isn't just AI that has destroyed the written word: the internet, smart phones, and cute emoji have already done an exemplary job of that. I cannot find any more fantasy literature that won't make me puke a little bit in my mouth every time I try to read it. Granted it all seems to fall under the grotesque umbrella known as YA so perhaps it cannot be helped, but where or where are the authors who wanted to expand the minds of their young readers? I cannot find them anywhere. When did you last see any sort of interesting grammatical structure in a sentence? They are bygones. And it depresses me.
  • rchaud 4y ago
    > it isn't just AI that has destroyed the written word: the internet, smart phones, and cute emoji have already done an exemplary job of that. I agree. I keep thinking ChatGPT's conversational abilities are massively oversold. Perhaps our expectations of human communication have been ground down over the years by 140-char discourse and 15 second videos.
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    > but where or where are the authors who wanted to expand the minds of their young readers? I cannot find them anywhere. Challenging writing has been iteratively squeezed out of books aimed at young readers. The goal of addressing as large a market as possible means every publisher wants all their authors targeting exactly where kids are, or a bit under, to maximize appeal. A couple decades of that pressure means "where kids are" keeps becoming a lower and lower target, because none of their books are challenging them anymore. Options outside of YA are dwindling because YA, romance/porn, and true crime / mystery / crime-thriller (all aiming at ever-lower reading levels with each passing year) are the only things people actually buy anymore, in large enough numbers to be worth the effort. Other genres simply can't support very many authors these days. Sci-fi and fantasy are hanging on mostly by shifting more heavily toward YA (and sometimes romance), as you've observed.
    • 4y ago
• ren_engineer 4y ago
  the use of commas and how it concludes statements is what usually gives it away the current work use cases for GPT is almost worse than crypto mining in terms of wasted compute resources: >manager uses GPT to make an overly long email >readers use GPT to summarize and respond then on the search front: >Microsoft and Google add these tools into their office suites >will then have to use more resources with Bing and Google Search to try and analyze web content to see if it was written with AI Huge amounts of wasted energy on this stuff. I'm going to assume that both Google and Microsoft will add text watermarks to make it easy for them to identify at some point
  • em500 4y ago
    Many moons ago when I worked in the finance sector, I noticed that a huge amount of work in the industry appear to comprise many groups of humans writing a elaborate stories around a few tables of numbers, while a bunch of other groups were trying to extract the numbers from the text again into some more usable tabular form again. Always seemed like a huge waste of human time and energy to me, best if it can be efficiently automated.
  • hex4def6 4y ago
    I've joked it's like the lecture scene in "Real Genius": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o The problem is, there is value in: A) Generating content by bot B) Generating summaries by bot It's just that the "lossiness" of each conversion step is going to be worrisome when it comes to the accuracy of information being transmitted. I suppose you can make the same argument when it's real humans in the chain. However, my fear is that we get into this self-feedback loop of bot-written articles that are wrong in some non-obvious way being fed back into knowledge databases for AIs, which in turn are used to generate articles about the given topic, which in turn are used in summaries, etc. I think traditionally referring back to primary sources was a way of avoiding this game of telephone, but I worry that even "primary sources" are going to start being AI-cowritten by default.
    • asdff 4y ago
      Speaking of primary sources, if you ask the chatbot to reference some facts, it might very well make up plausable sounding sources. Maybe the reference doesn't exist at all. Maybe the reference exists but its by a different author. Maybe the reference exists and its the correct author, but the quote isn't found in the book at all, and to verify now you need to get ahold of the book in some form. It just seems like a chore, all to end up not entirely confident that what you have is true signal anyhow.
• Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  The thing is that writing professional email as a non-native sucks. I'm a non-native English speaker myself. My level is typically considered very good (C2 CEFR level, which is the highest measured level in the European framework). If I need to write an email to a colleague whom I know and trust, that's easy. Writing this message in HN? Also easy, I'm just improvising it as I think it, not much slower than I would in my natural language. But writing an email to someone you don't know... that's very different. When you write in a non-native language, it's extremely easy to get the subtleties wrong: to sound too pushy about what you want, to make the matter seem more or less urgent than it really is, to sound too blunt or too polite... this doesn't matter with people you know or with strangers in an informal setting like this, but it does matter when emailing strangers in a professional setting, and it's extremely difficult to get right when you are non-native. Sometimes I used to spend 15-20 minutes brooding over an email in this type of scenario, making and rethinking edits while hitting the submit button... not anymore. ChatGPT: "Write an email reminding this person, who has this role, that the deadline for thing X expires on day Y. The email should be polite, assertive but not too pushy". Check the output, maybe make some trivial edits, because the difficult part (the tone) tends to be fine, at least for my standards. Done. Non-native speakers aren't going to renounce that luxury. It just makes too big of a difference to not use it in that case.
  • tayo42 4y ago
    fwiw im a native speaker of english and find corporate communication tough. there's nothing natural about it. corporate culture is just horrible overall
    • warner25 4y ago
      I second this. It can take multiple man-hours among native speakers to craft an email in a politically-sensitive, high-stakes professional environment. I worked under an executive who would keep her people (inner-circle advisors, direct reports, etc.) huddled around her desk all day as she slowly wrote and rewrote email responses to her boss(es) and executive peers. I hated having to go to her office for things because it was so easy to get pulled into that circle and feel like there was no escape. I'm a native speaker who has attained near-perfect scores on the verbal sections of the SAT and GRE, and I like writing, but I'm still a very slow writer myself.
• antibasilisk 4y ago
  I also find it problematic that ChatGPT resembles how I write about anything non-trivial, and it's lead to me being accused of using ChatGPT to respond to people's messages before.
  • asdff 4y ago
    Maybe you and chatgpt trained on the same set
    • antibasilisk 4y ago
      We kinda did, I basically grew up on the internet.
• vasco 4y ago
  > Maybe there will be a backlash and an attempt to certify humanity in written communication by inserting original and weird things into our writing? I've said it here before but I think we will speak in prompts. We'll go to other iterations before, but I think it'll stabilize by speaking in prompts. 1. First we start using the output of the LLM to send that to others 2. Then we start summarizing what we receive from others with an LLM 3. Finally we start talking to each other in prompts and whenever we need to understand someone better we run their prompt through an LLM to expand it instead of to summarize it. This path makes the most sense to me because human language evolves to how we think about things, and if a lot of our creative output and work will be generated from thinking in prompts that's how we'll start speaking too. By Greg Rutkowski.