>> Professors are asked to write letters for students all the time, and a good letter takes a long time to write. Indeed, and that's why you let the student wr

>> Professors are asked to write letters for students all the time, and a good letter takes a long time to write. Indeed, and that's why you let the student write it for you [1]. And then nobody reads it, or if they read it, the ignore it anyway and only look at the student's grades, if that. To be honest I don't understand recommendation letters. The whole concept looks completely backwards to me. Like I'm a young adept joining the guild of software engineers or something, but I need to get a recommendation from the School Master of OOP Patterns to get in, or something. Next you'll tell me a magick robot owl will fly in and take the letter to the Guild. If LLMs can get rid of this absurd practice, I'll count that as an honest to god example of beneficial use of neural nets. ____________________ [1] This is mostly the case in post-graduate letters of recommendation. Basically, you'll ask someone for a letter of recommendation and they'll reply asking what they should put in the letter. Then you send them an "example" or "sketch" letter, or just say outright "mind if I write it for you?", depending on how well you know them. The person you ask is always a senior academic who has another ten irons in the fire and they will only feel gratitude that you took this bitter cup away from them. I don't know if this is supposed to be kind of hush-hush, and it hasn't happened to me personally yet (some people will actually sit down and write a letter themselves, I guess as a matter of principle) but from what I understand it's really the done thing.