6 ms·
The most frustrating thing to me is to receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI that filled in the email with vapid and useless ta
by sebmellen 5mo ago
The most frustrating thing to me is to receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI that filled in the email with vapid and useless talking points, like "Let me know if you need any other blah blah blah; While there is clearly a need for system improvement, we are working hard to address the underlying and fundamental issue; This is a lesson that it's not just a feature, it's a critical path for our users, etc."
My theory is that people are fundamentally averse to the thought and effort it takes to write a good quality email. Then there’s probably some underlying belief that more volume shows more effort, which people will perceive positively. And finally, there's the worry that if you write the email yourself, you might make some embarrassing wording, grammar, or spelling mistake.
- munk-a 5mo agoSpecifically, lets imagine LLMs as compilers - you're passing your prompt through to get some pretty language at the end. Don't send me your compiled code, send me your prompt. Let it be rude, if the wording is awkward I guarantee I can understand it just as well as an LLM, ignore the fact that my daughter just graduated and offering hallucinated platitudes. Send me the actual question, don't make me try and decompile a big blob of empty text to the ten word prompt that contains all the actual meaning. AI is a useful tool for a variety of purposes, what it is not useful for is expanding a short statement to an essay and reducing an essay to a short statement. Either the communication deserves to be an essay or ten words will get it done.
- ikrenji 5mo agoJust because you yourself are OK with being talked to rudely, doesn't mean others are. In fact I'd wager most aren't consciously or unconsciously...
- not_kurt_godel 5mo agoYeah that attitude will not get you far in life unless you're Steve Jobs, and it'll sink your ship unless you're obnoxiously rich. And even if you're either/both of those things: A. you can and should act better, and B. people will always attach an asshole-asterisk to your name for the rest of your life and probably even a good while after.
- ryandrake 5mo agoExactly. In my 25+ year career, I've encountered maybe two dozen or so people whose e-mails and chats were terse, yet admittedly succinct, one-liners and most of them were also raging assholes to work with. The ones who also didn't use capital letters or punctuation in their communications were uniformly assholes.
- watwut 5mo agoMy experience is completely opposite. Majority of the people send short emails - sometimes badly written, sometimes well written. And when someone sends long emails, people dont read them. They kinda skim them and ignore the rest. And no, they are not all raging assholes.
- not_kurt_godel 4mo agoCorrect, I was referring to being arrogantly blunt and insensitive, not short/efficient emails.
- selcuka 5mo agoI'm pretty sure "rude" in this context means "brief and to the point", not insulting. Otherwise you can be rude with an LLM as well. Most people I know are happy to receive a focused email rather than an LLM-enhanced, 6 paragraph wall of text.
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoBut it's far less rude to just bluntly say something than to send an email generated by an LLM.
- munk-a 5mo agoI think rude was the wrong word to use. I more meant lacking the pomp and circumstance fluff. I always appreciate considerate and polite speech and think it's requisite to being taken seriously. However, I think directness within the bounds of politeness is optimal. Also, if it's wall-o-text or "staging must be updated before our os version is deprecated sunday" I prefer the latter.
- bobmarleybiceps 5mo agoyeah this is what drives me crazy about LLM writing. Most of the time the prompt has all the info you need and is like maybe a few sentences. Then the LLM expands it into a few paragraphs... I guess if someone is writing like a big fancy email to send out in bulk, maybe using an LLM to improve would make sense... but just emailing some coworkers it seems super lazy and insulting to send an LLM output :-I
- selcuka 5mo agoSome people send LLM generated replies in Slack chats! Now there's that.
- boredtofears 5mo agoI wonder if slight grammar incorrectness (like not capitalizing your sentences or using abbreviations) is going to start becoming a signal of authenticity for people subconsciously. Maybe it already has.
- keithnz 5mo agoif you are prompting such that the LLM isn't pulling context that the recipient doesn't have access to, then your email is likely marginal. ie the prompt "Send 'bob' an email with a description of why the VPN bridge isn't working so they can debug their side" is a mostly useless as a prompt for anyone, it's only useful when the LLM has all the context of some analysis of the particular issue and what is going on and then injects it into the email.
- munk-a 5mo agoDoes the recipient already have that context? If you want to share some internal context (say you're a front-end specialist and the recipient is quite unfamiliar with the limitations of your framework) then maybe that'd be helpful? If it's just regurgitating already communicated information then either 1. You are restating the information because you don't believe the recipient understood it the first time and thus you should be very precise in your expression to make sure it isn't too arcane for them 2. The recipient appears to understand the information already in which case why restate it?
- monkpit 5mo agoEither rely upon everyone else changing their behavior, or give up and use your LLM to re-compress incoming messages to be informationally dense as you see fit.
- edoceo 5mo agoIt's lossy tho. LLMs are crap at picking the "good stuff". Eg: the summary of the email covered the point about the family event but missed that the deal-terms were moving from Wyoming to Delaware.
- munk-a 5mo agoPersonally, I'm confident with my level of output so I'll continue to dutifully read all the crap that gets sent to me on company time. I'll just prefer to engage with people who communicate well and encourage that in others.
- monkpit 5mo agoA privileged position to be in, for sure! Congrats
- account42 5mo agoI prefer not communicating with people who don't respect my time.
- saltcured 5mo agoTangentially, yes, let's imagine LLMs as compilers. How insane is it to advocate the usage of these non-deterministic compilers, where each time you compile may produce different semantics? And then people resort to saving and hand-editing the compiled output. But when they want to change the source, they recompile and have to start over hand-editing the output again.
- munk-a 5mo agoActually, in professional usage in a technical setting this is my prime objection to heavily LLM driven development. Were the tools in usage deterministic then I'd be a lot less objecting to the mandating of their incorporation into workflows. I want to be reading, writing, testing and maintaining the software at the same layer. Right now extreme AI usage leads to reading, testing and maintaining happening in a less expressive language than writing and guess which of those four activities developers enjoy the least and find the hardest - it sure isn't writing.
- Krssst 5mo agoMore than non deterministic : LLMs don't have a specification to obey to in the first place, while compilers (rather, programming languages) do.
- setopt 5mo ago> Then there’s probably some underlying belief that more volume shows more effort Hopefully, LLMs will kill that attitude in the long run
- SpaceNoodled 5mo agoThey're already making it worse ...
- greenavocado 5mo agoLLM generated texts are an API ideal for interfacing with boomers
- _carbyau_ 5mo agoThe boomers I know are grumpy, impatient, can smell bullshit a mile away and are almost insultingly terse. Which is honestly refreshing. So LLMs have no place for me in this regard.
- greenavocado 5mo agoYet they immediately send their life savings to India when contacted
- not_a_bot_4sho 5mo ago> receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI Which is promptly and ironically summarized by AI on the receiving side
- outofpaper 5mo agoIt's almost as though someone was put in charge of AI growth and all they care about is token burn.
- andrekandre 5mo agothats completely illogical and no business would ever waste their money something like that (eyes-looking emoji)
- RobRivera 5mo agoO ho ho - [hearty laugh]
- selcuka 5mo agoSure, but LLMs are inherently lossy. There is no guaranteed way for the second AI to extract the original prompt from the text.
- singleshot_ 5mo agoLLM-written emails are too wordy. But maybe people think that’s what a good email is. (Did an LLM write your post?)
- sebmellen 5mo agoI would never disgrace you with reading my LLM output unless I explicitly identified it
- edoceo 5mo ago> more volume shows more effort I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. - M. Twain
- shye 5mo agoIt wasn’t Twain who wrote that letter: that quip was posthumously attributed to him, and have been used by multiple others. The earliest source we have for it is a letter by Blaise Pascal, some 250 before Twain ever thought about writing letters, or anything else for that matter.
- edoceo 5mo agoTIL. Thanks
- conductr 5mo agoIt seems to me like adoption of AI in the workplace has become mostly 1) authorship of verbose emails and 2) summarizing verbose emails for non-tech industries
- dgellow 5mo agoDon’t forget: - write verbose tickets - summaries the verbose tickets
- conductr 5mo agoEh, well, I have been trained by IT staff long before to write very detailed explanations of issues, attempts at fixing, step by step reproduction instructions, include screenshots, etc. I am sure AI has elevated it but the summarizing nature is probably a net benefit for those reading/managing tickets. I’m not in a ticket queue position other than as an end user needing support, so my only data point I have on it is the desktop support guy in my office says he’s on board with it all simply because he can write his snarky comments as he’s always wanted to and then just tell the LLM to make it friendly before sending.
- LinXitoW 5mo agoWell, business english IS annoyingly verbose and full of empty phrases. It would be cool if we could dispense with vapid pleasantries. I'm certainly not going to be the first to stake my job or my promotion on that particular hill. So I can fully understand why people will still turn "We need the database changes ASAP, you promised they'd be done. Get it done!" into half a page of drivel.