Comment by the_snooze

It's true: Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?

My 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.

I 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

Proton 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.

Maybe 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.

Formal 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...

I 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%2Fw...

Found it: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

It 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.

My 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.

If 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.

> 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 -- 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.

Google 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).

Do you happen to have a link for that comic?

what 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.

This is so funny I screamed laughed just reading over it XD

someday 99% of all computing power is going to be used to generate and summarize vast amounts of text.

This was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :D

[dead]

This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.

> we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.

This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!

Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you need to generate to deal with this silliness.

> people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.

It's more complicated than this.

The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete. The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but it can be part of an effective workflow to write good feedback.

Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.

I bet the reviews are evaluated by AI too—AI writes, AI evaluates, what could go wrong? :)

I hope it drives a cultural revival in appreciation of laconicism.

The secret is to add every meeting into your Jira as a task, and then close it once the meeting is done.

Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from your work, start talking about them as the work.

When your manager asks about your milestones, or accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance front and center.

When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the meetings, point out that you won't actually do any of it. Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10 hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours of testing etc.

"This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'

Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes. Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your ticket increase.)

Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings, you can relax in your own productivity.

Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your manager, you place the burden for action on him.

If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it off your plate.

Have you considered setting more meetings with various stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2 weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to change direction in an agile way?

I don't blame you for getting angry.

How big's the org? This setup feels unavoidable past a certain company size as growth attracts grifters who then call meetings atop meetings to appear useful.

Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?

That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If it can't be trusted to produce something that is both accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it to every process it gets shoved into.

I used Gemini to do a similar task and for whatever reason, i found it performed better when i broke down the task into individual steps.

Google's implementation of AI really shows the innovators dilemma in action

These features are just so rudimentary you just know a bunch of MBAs from McKinsey came up with them over a 7 month and $25m

I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?

That does sound generally useful. Out of interest: Do you ever see a one hour meeting being summed up so brief that the participants question why they spend an hour on the meeting (or more realistically, question if the LLM understood the meeting at all).

Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should be, you frequently see that no real progress was made, someone did all the work before the meeting started and this is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply pushed to the next meeting.

I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2 weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the person in question would make such an irresponsible promise (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he was talking completely hypothetically and not promising anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next sprint. Glad I verified it.

Congrats on winning an argument against your wife. Billions well spent.

I'm in this role for my company.

There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool.

There is value for concise drafts.

I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of cut their sinews.

I only use NotebookLM a couple times a month, but when I use it I get value from it. I wanted to put out a new edition of a book I wrote last year so I ingested the PDF for the previous version of my book and some notes on what I was thinking of adding. Then in Chat mode I asked for suggestions of interesting topics that I didn’t think of and a few other questions, then got a short summary that I used as a checklist for things that I might add.

I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my 20 minutes.

I really want to like Gemini Deep Research but I have had a pretty low ROI with it. It fails because it has no ability to evaluate the quality of sources, so some SEOd to hell page has equal weight as the deep dive blog post of a highly invested individual. Its also very hard to steer unless you provide paragraphs of context, if you provide too little it might hyper focus on something you said and go into some random rabbit hole of research.

I for one would love to try.