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Don't paste the AI, please

dontpastetheai.com

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Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#571

Post by prepend »

chrisweekly wrote: post #562
prepend wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly, I find the search in Slack, Teams, and Discord to be so horrible I don’t create any “knowledge there.” It’s like trying to write a paper on the telephone. Anyone putting long form stuff into an IM system is taking the way of pain.

(Replying to parent and GP) I wasn't suggesting an IM system should be the source of truth for long-form documentation. But searching Slack works better than searching email you weren't cc'd on. Virtually anything is better than email for many essential aspects of collaboration. Want to add someone to the mailing list and loop them in? How many prior emails will you forward to them? Someone replies to one of several…

I use a git-generated static site that has good search, so if people want to find stuff before asking that’s the go-to.

Otherwise, I can search email quite effectively. And oddly, its one of the few things Office Copilot is goos at.

I don’t email is a collaboration tool. It’s an information sharing tool and maybe workflow. Just today I had to email out to like 20 people a data call with a couple paragraphs of instruction. It’s much better than Slack for this. And I can search and find my email and their responses for all of eternity (I’ve got every email going back 20+ years instantly searchable in outlook, good luck finding a slack message from a month ago much less a decade).

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#572

Post by prepend »

conductr wrote: post #550
prepend wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found that a two-prong approach works best. Detail in the email, expect people to read it or fail. And include a reference to a wiki or some more detailed version that can be collaborated on and extended. So the email isn’t the primary source, the wiki is (really some markdown in git). But the email is the thing that people organize and find over time.

This probably differs a bit by your exact profession and circumstances. I could see devs and technical people (most of HN readers) to prefer and have success with this when operating with like minded peers. It doesn’t scale much outside that. If you work with people outside of tech/dev minded people, those who are not used to RTFM type info seeking, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

I think you may be right. Fortunately, I work with like 10k collaborators who are all science/tech oriented and it works quite well.

I wouldn’t want to work in an org where people can’t read email and want to talk to everyone instead.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#573

Post by prepend »

DenisM wrote: post #560
prepend wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think there’s only writing. I agree that brainstorming serves a very important function. But I’ve never encountered someone trying to brainstorm over email. If I did, I would certainly want to talk, instead. I was referring to someone saying that said it’s almost always better to talk than write. Good “content” is very hard to produce. It’s not a commodity. Again, I work in science and tech where truth is dif…

You missed my point. As a possible reader of your email I’m facing dozens of emails every day, my default reaction is to skip past and “read it later”. Maybe you did put a lot thought into it, how would I ever know? If you show up in person I will know you are invested into it.

Perhaps I missed your point.

I’m kind of lucky to be in the position where if you don’t read my email you will regret it because something bad happens. Or at best you miss out on something cool that would help you.

I expect everyone I send my email to to read it and pay attention to it, or I don’t send it to them.

Also, I’d love to have only dozens of email. I expect me and most of my coworkers go through 50-200 emails per day. And this isn’t a problem. I probably spend about 20 minutes a day, twice a day. And it’s way quicker than talking with everyone I want to talk with.

Maybe you’re working with a scale where it’s even possible to show up in person instead of emailing. But even when I worked in small teams and small companies we emailed a lot. For building software, I want to get stuff written down and iterated on (email, issue trackers, spreadsheets). I don’t want to have errors that come out of primarily verbal conversations.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#574

Post by zbentley »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #510
zbentley wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say more? I’ve found it quite useful and not a source of fear. It’s effective at calling out disrespect (human to human communication where one party stops participating as a human), and has been effective for me in writing my own communications more crisply and carefully

Fear of being tagged as AI even if you write the text yourself. For me personally, it's fear to use – and —. I have my versions of XKB keyboard layouts that handily map these but I don't use them anymore. Nor do I use emoji, because some 18-6 months ago AU output abused emoji.

I honestly don’t think those are going to get you flagged as mostly-AI or with high confidence. On anything longer than a sentence I’ve found the false positive rate to be perfectly reasonable.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#575

Post by Apocryphon »

avazhi wrote: post #424
evalystai wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

might be the case, but as soon as you have read and agree with it, that doesn't make it any kind of "ai slop" :) Is it relevant or helpful? Can I verify it? Are main questions IMO.

Whether you agree with it or not has no effect on whether it's AI slop or not. Outside of math or coding, domains in which there is objective determinism, any AI outputs are slop to the extent they purport to represent the AI's subjective opinion about something. So, an AI proving that 2+2=4 is not AI slop because it's just a formal proof, whereas an AI writing a missive about how 4 is its favourite number would be s…

I only read the "Do this instead" section and it sounds eminently reasonable, if not common sense.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#576

Post by altmanaltman »

darkwater wrote: post #557
altmanaltman wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That kind of people"? What do you mean? People who communicate clearly, don't over intellecutlize or wank their ego and actually get things done? Why is a soldier bad?

People blindly following orders (aka policies) because they must follow them. A (company) policy should always has well explained rationale behind it, if you want to treat fellow employees like thinking adults.

What? How does "copying and pasting " mean you are not reading and understanding "orders"? Furthermore, why is that required to be stated? If you're treating fellow employees like thinking adults, you don't want to explain everything as if they are children or that they don't know the obvious thing you're parading around as an insight important enough to warrant a reading by everyone.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#577

Post by mapontosevenths »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #387
mapontosevenths wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI. To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.

OK, but are you hiring semi-literate people to do jobs that involve writing at your company?

Everyone is. They just don't always know that.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#578

Post by mapontosevenths »

NateEag wrote: post #351
mapontosevenths wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI. To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.

I am literate and hyperlexic - I read ~500 words a minute, and have read thousands of books for fun. I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons, but one of them is the way it bastardizes and ruins the written word. It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do. The signal-to-noise ratio in genAI writing is just wretched. Yes, I can read the thousand-word ball of muck you past…

> It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do.

Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above.

> I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons

Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good:

a) Always find them to be bad

b) Are always bad at using them

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#579

Post by sbene970 »

whstl wrote: post #383
biztos wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WhatsApp voice message is very common in Spain. I always find it jarring when I'm there, mostly because I'm not used to it, but also because it seems to defeat the purpose of the messaging app: I can't listen to your voice message on the bus, for instance. It's so normalized there that I wonder whether this is a particularly Spanish habit. Maybe there are a bunch of countries where people routinely leave each oth…

I used to answer this with "I'm not listening to that, not even my parents send me voice messages" but it was called uncivil by some people, so now I just say "I can't listen to that right now" and never listen, eventually ppl send a text message.

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