5 ms·

Many people find writing very difficult or are not confident about their ability to do it accurately. For people like that, GPT can be a godsend. If they need t

Many people find writing very difficult or are not confident about their ability to do it accurately. For people like that, GPT can be a godsend. If they need to write an e-mail or short report for work, they can just give GPT a few bullet points and it will produce a perfectly serviceable, error-free text. People who need to write in a second language will find GPT especially useful, because they can write those bullet points in their first language and GPT will produce a text in the target language that both serves the purpose and is much better than anything they could produce on their own. The result is likely to be better than a straight machine translation, too, because GPT can, if appropriately prompted, adjust the content, structure, and formality of the text for the intended purpose. And, if they are trying to become more fluent in the target language, the text produced by GPT will be good to learn from, because it will show them how to say just what they were trying say.

nottorp 3y ago
Not so sure being served the text on a platter will lead to any improvement. Which is fine when some experienced person uses the generator to do something that they already know how to do (boilerplate code generation) or is tangential to their main activity (report generation). In the long run though, what happens when we reach a generation that is taught to use the LLMs for their job from the start? Will they be able to handle anything unexpected?
rprospero 3y ago
If my entire message can be condensed into a few bullet points that could be fed into ChatGPT, wouldn't it be an insult to my audience's time to provide them with anything but that very list of bullet points? This is exactly the thought that puts me in your category of "people [who] find writing very difficult"
- tkgally 3y ago
  Depending on the situation, a set of bullet points might seem insulting to your audience for other reasons. Here’s a real-world example. I live in Japan. While I am fluent in Japanese, it is not my first language and I am not confident about writing formal e-mails, as the grammar, vocabulary, and strategies for making requests are quite different from everyday usage. Now, though, I can feed prompts like the following to GPT-4: “Compose an e-mail in Japanese as follows: Sender: [my name and affiliation in Japanese] Recipient: [name of company in Japanese] Content: Request to visit the company to tell them about [my product name in Japanese], which is our new accounting software that uses AI to streamline work. Tell them that I can visit their headquarters at any time on any weekday. Ask them to reply by e-mail or to call my mobile at [number].” In a few seconds, it produced a much better e-mail than I would have been able to write without a lot of effort or someone else’s help [1]. From my experience, I can say with confidence that GPT-4’s e-mail is much more likely to elicit a response than anything I could compose by myself. (I would change one or two things in its version before sending it, though.) Millions of people around the world are like me: doing much of their work in a second language and often feeling at a disadvantage to native speakers, especially when writing for formal or public-facing purposes. GPT-4 is a great tool for people like us, as well as for people who are not confident about writing in their first language. [1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/20230511-email-composition.jpg https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/20230511-email-comp...

nottorp 3y ago

Not so sure being served the text on a platter will lead to any improvement. Which is fine when some experienced person uses the generator to do something that they already know how to do (boilerplate code generation) or is tangential to their main activity (report generation). In the long run though, what happens when we reach a generation that is taught to use the LLMs for their job from the start? Will they be able to handle anything unexpected?

rprospero 3y ago

If my entire message can be condensed into a few bullet points that could be fed into ChatGPT, wouldn't it be an insult to my audience's time to provide them with anything but that very list of bullet points? This is exactly the thought that puts me in your category of "people [who] find writing very difficult"

tkgally 3y ago
Depending on the situation, a set of bullet points might seem insulting to your audience for other reasons. Here’s a real-world example. I live in Japan. While I am fluent in Japanese, it is not my first language and I am not confident about writing formal e-mails, as the grammar, vocabulary, and strategies for making requests are quite different from everyday usage. Now, though, I can feed prompts like the following to GPT-4: “Compose an e-mail in Japanese as follows: Sender: [my name and affiliation in Japanese] Recipient: [name of company in Japanese] Content: Request to visit the company to tell them about [my product name in Japanese], which is our new accounting software that uses AI to streamline work. Tell them that I can visit their headquarters at any time on any weekday. Ask them to reply by e-mail or to call my mobile at [number].” In a few seconds, it produced a much better e-mail than I would have been able to write without a lot of effort or someone else’s help [1]. From my experience, I can say with confidence that GPT-4’s e-mail is much more likely to elicit a response than anything I could compose by myself. (I would change one or two things in its version before sending it, though.) Millions of people around the world are like me: doing much of their work in a second language and often feeling at a disadvantage to native speakers, especially when writing for formal or public-facing purposes. GPT-4 is a great tool for people like us, as well as for people who are not confident about writing in their first language. [1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/20230511-email-composition.jpg https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/20230511-email-comp...