[simplyluke]

What's funny is every GenAI "incredible email/essay" would be better communicated with the prompt used to generate it.

[afavour]

I’m only half joking when I’ve described ChatGPT-authored emails as a uniquely inefficient transport format.

Author feeds bullet points into ChatGPT which burns CPU cycles producing paragraphs of fluff. Recipient feeds paragraphs of fluff into ChatGPT and asks it to summarise into bullet points.

[heresie-dabord]

> Author feeds bullet points into ChatGPT which burns CPU cycles producing paragraphs of fluff.

GOOG, AMZN, and MSFT reportedly need to use nuclear energy to power the LLM farms that we are told we must have.

One must ask who (or what) in this feedback loop of inanity is doing the most hallucinating.

[1] _ https://apnews.com/article/climate-data-centers-amazon-googl...

[2] _ https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla...

[_ea1k]

I think you are on to something there. I've heard executives talk about their current AI flow and it all sounds like summarization.

There's an increasing amount of prose written that will only ever be read by LLMs.

[skynet97]

Similarily, MSFT recently announced the upcoming ability to clone your voice for Teams meetings. Extrapolating, in a few months, there will be Teams meetings which are only frequented by avatars. At the end of the meeting, you get an email with the essential content. Weird times ahead.

[jerf]

"Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's just worthless.

[eszed]

The way I explained it when I taught English 101 to first-year university students: any substantive question can generate an answer of a paragraph or a life's work; in this assignment I expect you to go into this much depth. Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. Giving a word-count to an AI seems (currently) to activate the same behavior. I've not yet seen an AI text that's better writing than a college freshman could be expected to produce.

[ANewFormation]

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes comes from one of his correspondences: 'My apologies for such a long letter, I hadn't the time to write a short one.'

[portaouflop]

I never had that requirement outside the first years of school- where it’s more about writing practice than writing actual essays. After it was always “must be below X pages”

[lupusreal]

Write a comment explaining that the ostensibly simple task of writing a dozen or so thank you letters for those socks/etc you received for Christmas can, for some people, be an excruciating task that takes weeks to complete, but with the aid of LLMs can easily be done in an hour.

On second thought, you're right. That was easy.

[NemoNobody]

That's old world stuff - I've never sent a thank you card and have lost no sleep bc of it.

[btown]

There's something painfully ironic and disturbing that the pseudo-Kolmogorov complexity of clickbait content, as judged "identical in quality" by an average human viewer, is arguably less than the length of the clickbait headline itself, and perhaps even less than the embedding vector of said headline!

[TeMPOraL]

It's always been this way, it's just rules of polite/corporate culture don't allow to say what you actually mean - you have to hit the style points and flatter the right people the right way, and otherwise pad the text with noise.

If the spread of AI would make it OK to send prompts instead of generated output, all it would do is to finally allow communicating without all the bullshit.

Related, a paradox of PowerPoint: it may suck as communication tool, but at the same time, most communication would be better off if done in bullet points.

[xhkkffbf]

They say that AI is just a great compression function.