4 ms·
How is AI in email a good thing?! There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns
by bambax 2y ago
How is AI in email a good thing?!
There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
- hoyd 2y agoDo you happen to have a link for that comic?
- ASalazarMX 2y agoNot the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics. https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
- bambax 2y agoYes, that's the one.
- monophonica 2y agohah that is wonderful. thank you.
- LtWorf 2y agoThis was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :D
- bambax 2y agoReally? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?
- energy123 2y agoIt almost can't be a good thing. LLMs are only useful when given all the relevant context. When you write an email, the context is mostly in your head.
- llm_trw 2y agoIt isn't, though; it's in all the meetings that happened beforehand and all the documents around them. The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to summarize what happened. Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it—and gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite. Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal when everyone has access to it.
- cutemonster 2y agoWhat big model do/did you use? > gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite What does that mean? That they got help, if they found the tech too complicated? > Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal Has this changed how people behave (yet)?
- llm_trw 2y agoThis was about a year ago so it was Claude 3 Opus for summaries and interrogation. Since then pretty much anything over 70b is good enough. And baby sit means hire something between a secretary developer that makes sure that important meetings had the record bot invited, gave it a once over and then went back to the 70% of their job that was actual development.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway287391 2y agoI like this version of the same joke (unfortunately no idea what the source is): https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwc8ne97ainda1.jpg https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...
- mcastillon 2y agoI think this underrates how many emails are literally just replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in gmail
- Boldened15 2y agoEmail is a dated form of communication, that's why every other message platform will let you just like and heart stuff.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoI have 5000+ unread items. I've skimmed maybe 50% of them, but not enough to consider them "read". It's 99% bullshit. Even legitimate email is spam these days. I'm too busy with other fake work to need to additional fake work managing pointless email comms.
- XorNot 2y agoI've adopted the inbox zero approach. If it's important it gets reclassified onto my task list with start and end dates, if it's useful info it gets filed, and everything else goes into trash. At this point I am thinking my Thunderbird should probably just unify the Inbox view and the Task view, since it would be a more accurate representation of how I view email.
- apsurd 2y agoI thought just now, isn't inbox zero just a cosmetic difference? For you: important things become tasks, useful things are filed, and everything else gets trashed. For me: important things get opened and replied to. Useful things are starred (and opened). Everything else stays untouched. And that pesky unread number is irrelevant because I mute all notifications. I'm not discounting your method, I am just now realizing the circle of it all.
- 2y ago
- Craighead 2y ago[dead]
- ryandrake 2y agoIt's true: Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?
- Clubber 2y agoYou can run it through AI to summarize it down to a sentence or two. It's like the telephone game but with computers.
- chrisandchris 2y agoThen why did you even write more than two sentences in the first place, if nothing else matters? Why didn't you write a summary-line at the beginning, consisting of two sentences? AI will not replace human thinking, even though many people seem to believe and put their brain on stand-by. It feels like someone wants to transport water from A to B and transports it as steam, just because _we can _.
- lazide 2y agoThis is the really hilarious ‘engineer thinking’ vs ‘normie’ thinking difference which rears its head sometimes. after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either? As long as we can all pretend they were thoughtful and meaningful, and someone isn’t using AI when making it (or just picking random crap off the shelf, and they removed the price tags) or using AI when reading it (aka making a big show of opening it, and then throwing them in the trash immediately after the person leaves), then we all get along. It even looks like we’re doing a ton of work/spending a ton of money to make the other person happy. Not that anyone does any of the things I’m describing, just being hypothetical, obviously. I suspect it will be obvious enough shortly it will go the way of the ‘popcorn bucket’ fad or the like, but for now…
- pdhborges 2y agoI get socks for Christmas and I like it.
- andrei_says_ 2y agoMy experience with LLMs expanding on bullet points is that they often enough misrepresent my intentions as a writer. Often in infuriatingly subtle ways. Same when summarizing, just less frequently. As someone who cares about precision and clarity in my writing, I do not use LLMs in the context of communication.
- bee_rider 2y agoGoogle seems to have an advantage here; as the client on both ends in many emails, they could just check if this ai expand/summary process is occurring and if so just send the bullet point (or if they want to be really clever just pass the bullet point through a thesaurus, so nobody will notice even if the sender happens to see what the recipient got).
- blitzar 2y agoMy email is disliked due to its brevity, turning the single clear and concise sentence of into a multi paragraph treatise might just lead to promotions, raises and bonuses which I can trickle down through the economy.
- wilg 2y agowhat are people even worried about here? they're just trying things to see whether they're useful. don't expand your emails into long prose if it adds no value for you and they will focus on other things.
- mschild 2y agoProton has a nice feature for writing emails. They specifically allow you a grammar/spell check and also change tone (formal/informal) and length. Length one I have never used but the grammar spell check is a godsend that I use almost always.
- jon-wood 2y agoYou're aware we've had grammar/spell check since (checks) 1961 right? It's built right into your operating system.
- mschild 2y agoYes, I'm aware. What AI/Proton provides isn't just a simple spellchecker though. It specifically recommends and alters wording to better suit the overall sentence structure. Essentially, it considers the context better than any built-in checker I've had in the past. It's also really useful to for words that are spelt almost the same. Suit and Suite for example. Also throughout my day, I'm constantly switching between 2 languages that have almost identically written words. Adress and Address. The normal spellchecks often don't mark it as an error because my computers and browsers naturally also have 2 installed keyboards and languages.
- Popeyes 2y agoMaybe you aren't in a space where it would be useful, but not everyone who has to write an email is a great and concise writer. I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy and they had to write emails and some of them were very poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great deal in providing information but also being able to understand what was coming back to them.
- tssva 2y agoI worked with engineers daily for around 40 years and now I work with trades people daily. In general the trades people are better communicators.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago> How is AI in email a good thing?! > There's a cartoon going around (...) Both frames of the cartoon represent a real perceived need: for the sender, the need to inflate the message to "look nice" because "people expect it", and then for the recipient, the need to summarize the nice-looking message to get the actual point they care about. Hopefully the use of AI in email will make that cartoon (and the underlying message) widespread, and lead to people finally realizing what they failed to realize all these decades: just send the goddamn bullet point. We don't need AI in e-mails. We just need to stop wasting each other's time. EDIT: and riffing off rpigab's comment downthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 -- I wish for the future people will feel comfortable, instead of sending AI-generated e-mails, to send the goddamn prompt instead. It carries all the information and much less noise. I mean, using LLMs makes sense if you actually need to communicate in prose - for many, myself included, it's much easier to evaluate whether some text sounds right, than to write it that way in the first place, so LLMs are useful in evolving and refactoring your own writing (and learning how to write better from it, over time). But that is rarely the case in transactional or business communication - for that, just send the prompt.
- ra0x3 2y agoThis is so funny I screamed laughed just reading over it XD
- GuB-42 2y agoFormal writing is just that. Alice: Hey, Bob, I finished the job, pay me Letter: Blah blah blah, Bob, blah blah blah, $$$, blah blah blah Bob: Oh, Alice is done, hey Charlie, pay her Letter: Blah blah blah, Charlie, blah blah blah, Alice, blah, $$$, blah blah Charlie: Ok, Alice is paid Letter: Blah blah, Alice, blah blah, $$$, blah blah, bank account, blah Alice: kthx Letter: Blah blah blah...
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y agoIf you're a non native speaker trying to get the tone just right with recipients whom you don't know, it's invaluable. Sometimes I would spend 15 minutes writing a 3 or 4-line email of this kind. Not anymore.
- Modified3019 2y agoFound it: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
- UltraSane 2y agosomeday 99% of all computing power is going to be used to generate and summarize vast amounts of text.
- ttepasse 2y agoThe most inefficient protocol of the internet.