Comment by pmarreck

honestly you could try this yourself today. Grab a few emails, paste them into chatgpt, and ask it to write a system prompt that will write emails that mimic your style. Might be fun to see how it describes your style.

to address your larger point, I think AI-generated drafts written in my voice will be helpful for mundane, transaction emails, but not for important messages. Even simple questions like "what do you feel like doing for dinner tonight" could only be answered by me, and that's fine. If an AI can manage my inbox while I focus on the handful of messages that really need my time and attention that would be a huge win in my book.

It all depends on how you use it, doesn't it?

A lot of work is inherently repetitive, or involves critical but burdensome details. I'm not going to manually write dozens of lines of code when I can do `bin/rails generate scaffold User name:string`, or manually convert decimal to binary when I can access a calculator within half a second. All the important labor is in writing the prompt, reviewing the output, and altering it as desired. The act of generating the boilerplate itself is busywork. Using a LLM instead of a fixed-functionality wizard doesn't change this.

The new thing is that the generator is essentially unbounded and silently degrades when you go beyond its limits. If you want to learn how to use AI, you have to learn when not to use it.

Using AI for social media is distinct from this. Arguing with random people on the internet has never been a good idea and has always been a massive waste of time. Automating it with AI just makes this more obvious. The only way to have a proper discussion is going to be face-to-face, I'm afraid.

About writing a counterargument for social media: I kinda get it, but what's the end game of this? People reading generated responses others (may have) approved? Do we want that? I think I don't.

The live demos were neat! I was playing around with "The Pete System Prompt", and one of the times, it signed the email literally "Thanks, [Your Name]" (even though Pete was still right there in the prompt).

Just a reminder that these things still need significant oversight or very targeted applications, I suppose.

It's what we want, though, isn't it? AI should make our lives easier, and it's much easier (and more productive) to review work already done than to do it yourself. Now, if that is a good development morally/spiritually for the future of mankind is another question... Some would argue industrialization was bad in that respect and I'm not even sure I fully disagree

What is the point? The effort to write the email is equal to the effort to ask the AI to write the email for you. Only when the AI turns your unprofessional style into something professional is any effort saved - but the "professional" sounding style is most of the time wrong and should get dumped into junk.