I do not want AI to "polish" me • Hacker News Board

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#211

Post by user9925 » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #162

flatline wrote: post #26

> It’s like my whole computer is a toddler screaming “LET ME DO IT!” every time I try to create something. Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprieta…

Thing is, we've been here before in a much more limited way; people _hated_ it when Microsoft's demonic paperclip did this in Office. "It looks like you're writing a letter". _Hated_ it. It is unclear what the industry thinks has changed, that people will now welcome "It looks like you're [whatever]".

Kind of silly to compare LLMs to clippy...

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#212

Post by hulium » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

Even though I am not a fan of it, I can see how some people might want to use AI to improve their grammar, maybe because they are afraid to leave a bad impression.

But why would anyone put AI generated images into an Email?

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#213

Post by 65 » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:37 PM UTC

ongytenes wrote: post #176

Soon everyone will be texting, emailing etc with an AI secretary doing it all. "AI take a letter and polish it up for me..." Maybe even video conferences will use 'Polish' to portray a recreated lifelike sophisticated avatar with real time grammar correction. When folks finally do meet in real life, they will discover slobs, socially awkward or tactless idiots instead of the suave intellect portrayed by the AI. LOL

Person 1: AI, take these bullet points and write an email to Person 2

Person 2: AI, please take this email from Person 1 and convert it into bullet points

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#214

Post by echelon_musk » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:39 PM UTC

munchler wrote: post #122

xnorswap wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has simultaneously created two industries: One around using AI to pad out documents and another one around summarising with AI. The more the first pads, the more the second is needed. If AI really were Intelligent, I'd fear it's an organism making sure it's needed in the ecosystem.

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

I haven't laughed this hard in a while. Thanks

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#215

Post by bityard » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:39 PM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #202

Why is the author mad? The "polish" button does exactly what you would expect it to do if you understand "polish" as "make polite". If you want to keep your words true and "unpolished", maybe at the risk of sounding rude, then don't use that feature. It is actually one of the first things I used LLMs for, and I still am. Latest example, I received an email from an administration asking me to sign some document, but i…

> and I didn't want to sound rude

I think it's interesting how this has changed. If you go back and look at politically correct corpo-speak from decades past, it was bland and impersonal but aimed to be direct, clear, and reasonably concise.

These days, it's still impersonal but now couched in platitudes, apologies, and excessively polite language in an attempt to avoid possibly offending anyone in any conceivable fashion.

I'm worried that we'll get to a point in regular work communications where responding to a question with a simple and succinct "yes" instead of, "Great idea, I think that is an absolutely perfect plan and you surely deserve a call-out at the next all-hands meeting for coming up with the idea to fix that problem in the team's code!!!" will get you put on an HR watchlist for being difficult to get along with.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#216

Post by jrockway » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #192

Rendello wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a recent Show HN , I got an email from someone saying that they'd set up a page for my 'product' on their product showcase startup site. I followed the link and saw my open-source project pitched as ChatGPT slop. It felt like a violation because it wasn't just an aggregated link, but a rewrite of my readme with an associated 'pitch'.

I recommend reporting this to dang at hn@ycombinator.com. I imagine that he'd be interested in someone crawling HN in order to send automated lead generation spam.

I get a ton of emails from people on HN and I dunno, it's really my fault for putting my email in my profile. I don't blame HN for this; I don't think it's particularly supportive of this kind of "abuse".

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#217

Post by jrockway » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

bityard wrote: post #204

CharlesW wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend reporting this to dang at hn@ycombinator.com. I imagine that he'd be interested in someone crawling HN in order to send automated lead generation spam.

I don't think dang can do anything about it, I'm sure HN gets scraped all the time. I routinely get spam from cryptocurrency startups to (obfuscated) email addresses I have posted on HN years ago on "Who Wants to be Hired" threads, and from my commit messages on github.

Github is definitely quite the source of spam. I ended up realizing that when I was tired of having two .gitconfigs with two email addresses (work/personal) and switched to just putting my @users.noreply.github.com in there. No more spam.

(Plus I get to show off my 4 digit Github userid. I was the 2367th person to sign up! ;)

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#218

Post by noisy_boy » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #121

> Kill me if I ever write "Regards" non-irnoically. One time, I couldn't remember the name of the album I wanted SIRI to play, so it kept picking the wrong one. After the fifth or so time, I told Siri, "you're killing me Siri" and it called 911. The future sucks.

You must be extraordinarily polite to say something that mild after that many failed tries. I mutter expletives at chatGPT much sooner. AIR (AI induced rage) is going to be a thing. I just hope it doesn't start to reverse affect how I behave with people.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#219

Post by bityard » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

cbold wrote: post #73

I want a tool that would reverse the content to the original prompt. > "Write a thank you note that sounds sincere to that ahole" > "Some deep musing on the meaning of life tied to b2c marketing for a LinkedIn post"

I was playing with a self-hosted model a while back and instructed it to only give answers that were unhelpful, vague, and borderline rude.

It worked surprisingly well a lot of the time! But most of the time it also kinda broke the model in terms of coherent answers because it was obviously trained for the exact opposite thing.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#220

Post by bityard » Wed, Jan 29, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #45

Good news is that AI is equally adept at turning long polite business speak emails into short, blunt, and sweary emails, so you can choose what you prefer.

I don't think Gmail/Outlook offer that yet. (But I might actually use it if they did!)