Comment by sirsinsalot 2 months ago
I saw a Google AI advert that said:
"Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can't make their wedding."
That's not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines work for me.
Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.
A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
What happens when social skills are delegated too?
4. Awkward situation ensues when you both meet at a location AI recommended to you both just after telling it to lie about your schedule.
You can skip the piles and piles of linguistic bullshit and wasted energy with a json API.
If you really care about this issue, I think we've brought it on ourselves.
Regarding teaching kids, we've set messaging templates for occasions that are at the center of our lives. We have Hallmark greeting cards to express feelings to people close to our hearts. If there's a template for expressing someone you're sorry their mother died, or happy they have a baby, I'm not sure throwing the stone at AI use is warranted.
In a way, I wonder if it will be the wake up call that will make simple and genuine communication acceptable again, without all the boilerplate we've built to feign care and emotions.
People always criticize Hallmark but it was never my understanding that the pre-written sentiment in those cards in any way obviated the need to write your own message. In fact, apart from generic Christmas cards you might get from insurers, and "thank you" cards from charities, I can't think of a time I've gotten such a card without a personal message written in it.
Are people really buying the "sorry for your loss" cards, just signing under the prewritten text, and sending them to someone?
There's a spectrum, including people who write almost nothing but choose really nice and non standard cards that properly convey they took time and effort find that specific one, and the people who use generic cards with 1500 words written on every free space they could find on the card.
My main gripe with cards with pre-written message is they deprive from the choice to write simple and obvious things. If your card already says "Happy Birthday" it will just be that much lazier for you to only write that on the dedicated space for a personal message.
In a way, a blank card with only these word would probably work better, and I feel people too often overlook that choice and go the Hallmark way instead because it feels like the default. Or plain bail out of the interaction because it just become a hurdle to them as they don't find anything else to say.
If I'm being honest with myself, the "Happy Birthday" pre-written text forces me to choose something else to write as my personal message.
Yeah, it's frustrating in the moment that the exact sentiment I want to express (have a happy birthday) is already taken and repeating it seems lazy, but when I think about it: it's lazy to just express such a generic sentiment anyway.
Asking them to think on the year, and to look ahead, maybe reminding them of some things they've done and achieved is not only nicer to receive, it's nicer to write too.
I don't hate Hallmark for this (though I do in the moment that I'm confronted with this random creative challenge).
Lois C.K says this about George Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zkizucPU
> So I was doing it at a Chinese restaurant called Kowloon in Boston, it’s August, Massachusetts, and I was sitting in my car after the show just feeling like, “This was all a big mistake, I’m not good enough, and I felt like my jokes were a trap, and I listened to a CD of George talking about comedy and workshopping it and talking about it seriously, and the thing that blew me away about this fellow was he kept putting out—specials, every year there’d be a new George Carlin special, a new George Carlin album, they just kept coming, and each one was deeper than the next, and I just thought, how can he do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never do that. I was telling the same jokes for fifteen years, so I’m listening and they asked him, “How do you do all this material?” And I hear him and he says, “I just decided every year I’d be working on that year’s special, and I do the special and then I just chuck out the material and then I start with nothing.” And I thought, “That’s crazy. How do you throw away. It took me fifteen years to build this shitty hour. If I throw it away, I’ve got nothing.”
> But he gave me the courage to try, but also I was desperate, what the fuck else was I going to do? This idea that you throw everything away and you start over again. And I thought, “Well, okay, when you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, and you throw those away, what have you got left?” You can only dig deeper, you can start talking about your feelings and who you are and then you do those jokes and they’re gone. You’ve gotta dig deeper, so you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares, and doing jokes about that, and then they’re gone. [and so on].
My point is, it forces you to dig a bit deeper.
This is of course a great point.
I have the feeling we're not that far apart on principle, as I see the starting from a blank state as a nice default that will often lead to nice things.
That's kinda why I enjoy plain non-descript cards even if people then write platitudes on them. It's still their own platitudes that resonate with them. Also people that can dig deeper tend to feel the pressure to so anyway in my experience, and people who stay very terse often couldn't really go beyond.
The most interesting instance of this is remote family that are only easily accessible by message, and we see some sending walls of greetings, while others will write a full email with a photo and 10 words top, their name included.
Can I recommend that you do the same to them except write your handwritten parts on the back of the card.
This is such a perfect analogy and I never put it together before.
I cannot stand those cards but to a greater extent receiving them. It really does feel worse than not getting anything. It's actually a slap in the face to me that someone would go out of their way to say nothing like this. It's proof that the relationship is fake.
I feel the same disgust when people throw inauthentic AI bullshit to me. How little do you have to care about someone to delegate a robot or a template to mediate your interactions because you can't be bothered?
Gemini's marketing is so bad. This isn't the first time they ran an ad that makes you wonder what's going on there. It really says a lot that an advertising company understands what makes for good advertising so poorly these days.
> A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
I’m not going to defend AI here because I seldom use it myself. But it should be noted that the way we learn has already undergone multiple different shifts due to changes in technology.
Search engine were a big one. No longer did we have to learn to memorise stuff nor learn how to research properly. Now we could just type a phrase into Google / whatever and get results. So people learned how to search rather than learning the facts itself.
> "A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking."
What about this:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to...
Second law of thermodynamics says these models will all eventually collapse (due to overtraining on their own output) to yelling gibberish at us, and biology will continue to remain the only force in the universe capable of maintaining order despite increasing entropy. I think we'll be OK.
I guess the future is
1. Friend sends an apology email drafted by LLM.
2. Email gets summarized at the receiver end in the daily AI email "summary" which might be something like
You have a scheduled cake tasting this weekend. Did you know there's a bakery near your office that makes wedding cakes too. By the way your friend Joe can't make it to the wedding, do you want me to send a reply?
3. Reply email gets summarized by AI.
"Your friend acknowledges that you cannot rsvp. Do you want to schedule a wedding gift delivery on their wedding day ? XYZ neighborhood/online store has a sale next week".