5 ms·

What's funny is every GenAI "incredible email/essay" would be better communicated with the prompt used to generate it.

jerf 2y ago
"Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's just worthless.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  I never had that requirement outside the first years of school- where it’s more about writing practice than writing actual essays. After it was always “must be below X pages”
  - bluGill 2y ago
    X words is supposed to be a proxy for do enough research that you have something to say with depth. A history of the world in 15 minutes better cover enough ground to be worth 15 minutes - as opposed to 1 minute and then filler words. Of course filler is something everyone who writes such a thing and comes up a few words short does - but you are supposed to go find something more to say.
  - desdenova 2y ago
    When I was a lazy kid, and there was a requirement to fill a number of lines/pages, I'd just write with bigger letters.
  - QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
    I eventually flipped from moaning about word count minimums to whining about conference page limits but it took a long, long time- well into grad school. The change came when I finally had something to say.
- eszed 2y ago
  The way I explained it when I taught English 101 to first-year university students: any substantive question can generate an answer of a paragraph or a life's work; in this assignment I expect you to go into this much depth. Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. Giving a word-count to an AI seems (currently) to activate the same behavior. I've not yet seen an AI text that's better writing than a college freshman could be expected to produce.
  - xivzgrev 2y ago
    Wish my high school English teachers had taught that. I remember fluffing essays to get to a minimum College admissions essays on the other hand had the opposite problem - answering a big question in 500 words. Each sentence needed to pack a punch.
    - eszed 2y ago
      Don't get me started on college admissions essays. Rich kids pay other people to write them. Poor kids don't understand the class-markers they're expected to include. If AI consigns them to the dustbin of history it might be the first unalloyed good that tech ever does.
      - eszed 2y ago
        Clarification: "that tech" meaning the direct antecedent: "[AI] tech", not tech in general. I'm a Humanities guy, not an idiot. :-)
  - iambateman 2y ago
    > Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. This is the most beautiful sentence I’ve read today.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes comes from one of his correspondences: 'My apologies for such a long letter, I hadn't the time to write a short one.'
  - Loranubi 2y ago
    Probably not by Twain, but still a good quote. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
btown 2y ago
There's something painfully ironic and disturbing that the pseudo-Kolmogorov complexity of clickbait content, as judged "identical in quality" by an average human viewer, is arguably less than the length of the clickbait headline itself, and perhaps even less than the embedding vector of said headline!
lupusreal 2y ago
Write a comment explaining that the ostensibly simple task of writing a dozen or so thank you letters for those socks/etc you received for Christmas can, for some people, be an excruciating task that takes weeks to complete, but with the aid of LLMs can easily be done in an hour. On second thought, you're right. That was easy.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  That's old world stuff - I've never sent a thank you card and have lost no sleep bc of it.
  - floydnoel 2y ago
    you’re so cool!
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    I’d prefer to receive no thank you than to receive an AI written one. One says you don’t care, the other says you don’t care but also want to deceive me.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      There's the third case: they care. In which you wouldn't be able to tell whether the card is "genuine" or AI written; the two things aren't even meaningfully different in this scenario.
      - SoftTalker 2y ago
        You can tell if the thank-you card is hand-written. Most people don't have a pen plotter connected to their AI text generator to write thank-you notes. Emailed or texted "thank you" notes don't count. At all.
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Yes, but they could also generate the text and transcribe it onto paper by hand. For many people, myself included, 90%+ work on things like thank-you notes, greetings, invitations, or some types of e-mails, is in coming up with the right words and phrases. LLMs are a great help here, particularly with breaking through the "blank page syndrome". It's not that different from looking up examples of holiday greetings on-line, or in a book. And the way I feel about it, if an LLM manages to pick just the right words, it's fine to use them - after all, I'm still providing the input, directing the process, and making a choice which parts of output to use and how. Such text is still "mine", even if 90% of it came from GPT-4.
afavour 2y ago
I’m only half joking when I’ve described ChatGPT-authored emails as a uniquely inefficient transport format. Author feeds bullet points into ChatGPT which burns CPU cycles producing paragraphs of fluff. Recipient feeds paragraphs of fluff into ChatGPT and asks it to summarise into bullet points.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  > Author feeds bullet points into ChatGPT which burns CPU cycles producing paragraphs of fluff. GOOG, AMZN, and MSFT reportedly need to use nuclear energy to power the LLM farms that we are told we must have. One must ask who (or what) in this feedback loop of inanity is doing the most hallucinating. [1] _ https://apnews.com/article/climate-data-centers-amazon-google-nuclear-energy-e404d52241f965e056a7c53e88abc91a https://apnews.com/article/climate-data-centers-amazon-googl... [2] _ https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla...
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    Then users turn around and feed the fluff into energy hungry summarizers because who has time for a 5 paragraph email that could’ve been a three point bulleted list?
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      It would be a net win if it could normalize sending prompts instead of normal communication, which is not far in terms of useless waste of energy and space to LLM output that emulates it.
- _ea1k 2y ago
  I think you are on to something there. I've heard executives talk about their current AI flow and it all sounds like summarization. There's an increasing amount of prose written that will only ever be read by LLMs.
- skynet97 2y ago
TeMPOraL 2y ago
It's always been this way, it's just rules of polite/corporate culture don't allow to say what you actually mean - you have to hit the style points and flatter the right people the right way, and otherwise pad the text with noise. If the spread of AI would make it OK to send prompts instead of generated output, all it would do is to finally allow communicating without all the bullshit. Related, a paradox of PowerPoint: it may suck as communication tool, but at the same time, most communication would be better off if done in bullet points.
xhkkffbf 2y ago
They say that AI is just a great compression function.

jerf 2y ago

"Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's just worthless.

portaouflop 2y ago
I never had that requirement outside the first years of school- where it’s more about writing practice than writing actual essays. After it was always “must be below X pages”
- bluGill 2y ago
  X words is supposed to be a proxy for do enough research that you have something to say with depth. A history of the world in 15 minutes better cover enough ground to be worth 15 minutes - as opposed to 1 minute and then filler words. Of course filler is something everyone who writes such a thing and comes up a few words short does - but you are supposed to go find something more to say.
- desdenova 2y ago
  When I was a lazy kid, and there was a requirement to fill a number of lines/pages, I'd just write with bigger letters.
- QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
  I eventually flipped from moaning about word count minimums to whining about conference page limits but it took a long, long time- well into grad school. The change came when I finally had something to say.
eszed 2y ago
The way I explained it when I taught English 101 to first-year university students: any substantive question can generate an answer of a paragraph or a life's work; in this assignment I expect you to go into this much depth. Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. Giving a word-count to an AI seems (currently) to activate the same behavior. I've not yet seen an AI text that's better writing than a college freshman could be expected to produce.
- xivzgrev 2y ago
  Wish my high school English teachers had taught that. I remember fluffing essays to get to a minimum College admissions essays on the other hand had the opposite problem - answering a big question in 500 words. Each sentence needed to pack a punch.
  - eszed 2y ago
    Don't get me started on college admissions essays. Rich kids pay other people to write them. Poor kids don't understand the class-markers they're expected to include. If AI consigns them to the dustbin of history it might be the first unalloyed good that tech ever does.
    - eszed 2y ago
      Clarification: "that tech" meaning the direct antecedent: "[AI] tech", not tech in general. I'm a Humanities guy, not an idiot. :-)
- iambateman 2y ago
  > Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. This is the most beautiful sentence I’ve read today.
ANewFormation 2y ago
One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes comes from one of his correspondences: 'My apologies for such a long letter, I hadn't the time to write a short one.'
- Loranubi 2y ago
  Probably not by Twain, but still a good quote. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

btown 2y ago

There's something painfully ironic and disturbing that the pseudo-Kolmogorov complexity of clickbait content, as judged "identical in quality" by an average human viewer, is arguably less than the length of the clickbait headline itself, and perhaps even less than the embedding vector of said headline!

lupusreal 2y ago

Write a comment explaining that the ostensibly simple task of writing a dozen or so thank you letters for those socks/etc you received for Christmas can, for some people, be an excruciating task that takes weeks to complete, but with the aid of LLMs can easily be done in an hour. On second thought, you're right. That was easy.

NemoNobody 2y ago
That's old world stuff - I've never sent a thank you card and have lost no sleep bc of it.
- floydnoel 2y ago
  you’re so cool!
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I’d prefer to receive no thank you than to receive an AI written one. One says you don’t care, the other says you don’t care but also want to deceive me.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    There's the third case: they care. In which you wouldn't be able to tell whether the card is "genuine" or AI written; the two things aren't even meaningfully different in this scenario.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      You can tell if the thank-you card is hand-written. Most people don't have a pen plotter connected to their AI text generator to write thank-you notes. Emailed or texted "thank you" notes don't count. At all.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Yes, but they could also generate the text and transcribe it onto paper by hand. For many people, myself included, 90%+ work on things like thank-you notes, greetings, invitations, or some types of e-mails, is in coming up with the right words and phrases. LLMs are a great help here, particularly with breaking through the "blank page syndrome". It's not that different from looking up examples of holiday greetings on-line, or in a book. And the way I feel about it, if an LLM manages to pick just the right words, it's fine to use them - after all, I'm still providing the input, directing the process, and making a choice which parts of output to use and how. Such text is still "mine", even if 90% of it came from GPT-4.

afavour 2y ago

I’m only half joking when I’ve described ChatGPT-authored emails as a uniquely inefficient transport format. Author feeds bullet points into ChatGPT which burns CPU cycles producing paragraphs of fluff. Recipient feeds paragraphs of fluff into ChatGPT and asks it to summarise into bullet points.

heresie-dabord 2y ago
> Author feeds bullet points into ChatGPT which burns CPU cycles producing paragraphs of fluff. GOOG, AMZN, and MSFT reportedly need to use nuclear energy to power the LLM farms that we are told we must have. One must ask who (or what) in this feedback loop of inanity is doing the most hallucinating. [1] _ https://apnews.com/article/climate-data-centers-amazon-google-nuclear-energy-e404d52241f965e056a7c53e88abc91a https://apnews.com/article/climate-data-centers-amazon-googl... [2] _ https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla...
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  Then users turn around and feed the fluff into energy hungry summarizers because who has time for a 5 paragraph email that could’ve been a three point bulleted list?
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It would be a net win if it could normalize sending prompts instead of normal communication, which is not far in terms of useless waste of energy and space to LLM output that emulates it.
_ea1k 2y ago
I think you are on to something there. I've heard executives talk about their current AI flow and it all sounds like summarization. There's an increasing amount of prose written that will only ever be read by LLMs.
skynet97 2y ago

TeMPOraL 2y ago

It's always been this way, it's just rules of polite/corporate culture don't allow to say what you actually mean - you have to hit the style points and flatter the right people the right way, and otherwise pad the text with noise. If the spread of AI would make it OK to send prompts instead of generated output, all it would do is to finally allow communicating without all the bullshit. Related, a paradox of PowerPoint: it may suck as communication tool, but at the same time, most communication would be better off if done in bullet points.

xhkkffbf 2y ago

They say that AI is just a great compression function.