Comment by bambax

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

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