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Please stop sending me emails written by GPT

mkbaio.substack.com

61–70 of 84 posts

Re: Please stop sending me emails written by GPT

#61

The author seems unaware or at least uninterested in the fact that writing style can have a dramatic impact on output. It's unclear if they wish to not be emailed "by ChatGPT" or if they wish to not have to sift through unnecessary and flowery pose. I'll spare you the details, but a follow up "That's great. However, please rewrite it in the style of Ernest Hemingway." delivers concise, yet obviously Hemingway-esque e…

If we can pick a style, I would like the one of Mark Twain :) Although, I don't know how he would feel about being mimic'ed million-fold.

I asked Bing what he would say about it:

> The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter. The artificial race has one really ineffective weapon, and that is imitation. - Mark Twain (paraphrased)

Re: Please stop sending me emails written by GPT

#63
post #57
post #49

What is going to happen if people start to increase the length of emails and laws (luckily privacy stuff are being reduced in Europe to be more easily understandable by non-lawyers) to the point where it's like a book, imagine people stop to read them at all, and just use LLMs to ask questions directly, which can still marginally give wrong answers. It's like bypassing human limit of time, because now people can read…

sender: writes summarized prompt llm: emits excessively lengthy and polite prose smtp: transports lengthy prose llm: summarizes lentghy prose to bullet points recipient: reads summary what a wonderful waste of energy

The way out of this is to make it acceptable to send emails that open with a polite greeting and then just outline their message in bullet points. As long as they're intelligible and not outright rude, emails really don't need to be a writing contest.

Re: Please stop sending me emails written by GPT

#64
post #42
post #11

> Please if you want to send me a message and feel compelled to use GPT, please just send me whatever you wrote in your prompt instead. I promise I will still read it! Best bit of the article. Question for someone who knows more about this stuff. How likely is it to get the same response to the same prompt with gpt ? Does it have some kind of random seed applied behind the scenes? -edit- Thank you for the responses.…

Seriously. We're going to have ChatGPT inflate content, then readers will use AI summarizers to distill it. Seems like we should all just be communicating via bullet points grug or Kevin Malone style.

Brevity will be valued once again.

Re: Please stop sending me emails written by GPT

#65
post #45

The author seems unaware or at least uninterested in the fact that writing style can have a dramatic impact on output. It's unclear if they wish to not be emailed "by ChatGPT" or if they wish to not have to sift through unnecessary and flowery pose. I'll spare you the details, but a follow up "That's great. However, please rewrite it in the style of Ernest Hemingway." delivers concise, yet obviously Hemingway-esque e…

The prompt is a much better email than the stuff it produced: > The /customers and /address endpoints are complete, but we're still waiting on the architecture team to finish the /orders spec. I'll also be taking Friday off. vs. garbage about gazelles, and the fact that telephones exist.

Right, that's why the PG version (unattached) is better.

Re: Please stop sending me emails written by GPT

#66
post #34

The author seems unaware or at least uninterested in the fact that writing style can have a dramatic impact on output. It's unclear if they wish to not be emailed "by ChatGPT" or if they wish to not have to sift through unnecessary and flowery pose. I'll spare you the details, but a follow up "That's great. However, please rewrite it in the style of Ernest Hemingway." delivers concise, yet obviously Hemingway-esque e…

I love these multi-step prompt 'hacks'. They very much take advantage of the fact that this is still 'just' a model predicting the next token. Asking a model to write an email as if it were written by Hemingway requires the model to generate a probability distribution based on the context of an email it needs to write + the style it needs to write it. In the second approach, you've changed the model weights/inputs by…

Those hacks are snake oil

Re: Please stop sending me emails written by GPT

#67

The author seems unaware or at least uninterested in the fact that writing style can have a dramatic impact on output. It's unclear if they wish to not be emailed "by ChatGPT" or if they wish to not have to sift through unnecessary and flowery pose. I'll spare you the details, but a follow up "That's great. However, please rewrite it in the style of Ernest Hemingway." delivers concise, yet obviously Hemingway-esque e…

For me, it's a matter of decency. If you're sending me an email and you're expecting that I'll read it, you're asking me to invest my time (presumably for your benefit). But, you're unwilling to make the same investment with your time by using a tool to simulate a human connection. Having excessively long, unedited prose adds insult to injury since you've doubled down on the decision to spend someone else's time as l…

This is why you have another AI on the other side that reads it for you.

Re: Please stop sending me emails written by GPT

#68
I haven't thought too deeply about it, but do we have a moral obligation to be "authentic" when writing something? I.e., writing with our own words instead of using a machine to speak our minds? An email entirely written by chatGPT seems problematic.

Re: Please stop sending me emails written by GPT

#70

The author seems unaware or at least uninterested in the fact that writing style can have a dramatic impact on output. It's unclear if they wish to not be emailed "by ChatGPT" or if they wish to not have to sift through unnecessary and flowery pose. I'll spare you the details, but a follow up "That's great. However, please rewrite it in the style of Ernest Hemingway." delivers concise, yet obviously Hemingway-esque e…

> I'll also be taking Friday off.

Turns into:

> Come Friday, I won't be in. Just one day. Things will continue, though. Any emergencies, I'm a call away.

Off is off, don't call me. Must have been trained on a lot of linkedin posts to volunteer your personal time like this.

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