It sounds like that relationship was not supposed to be salvaged to begin with. ChatGPT perhaps prolonged your friend's suffering, who ended up moving on in the end. Perhaps unnecessarily delayed.
My knee-jerk reaction is that outsourcing thinking and writing to an LLM is a defeat of massive proportions, a loss of authenticity in an increasingly less authentic world.
On the other hand, before LLMs came along, didn't we ask a friend or colleague for their opinion on an email we were about to write to our boss about an important professional or personal matter?
I have been asked several times to give advice on the content and tone of emails or messages that some of my friends were about to send. On some occasions, I have written emails on their behalf.
Is it really any different to ask an LLM instead of me? Do I have a better understanding of the situation, the tone, the words, or the content to use?
Firstly, when you ask a friend or colleague you're asking a favour that you know will take them some time and effort. So you save it for the important stuff, and the rest of the time you keep putting in the effort yourself. With an LLM it's much easier to lean on the assistance more frequently.
Secondly, I think when a friend is giving advice the responses are more likely to be advice, i.e. more often generalities like "you should emphasize this bit of your resume more strongly" or point fixes to grammar errors, partly because that's less effort and partly because "let me just rewrite this whole thing the way I would have written it" can come across as a bit rude if it wasn't explicitly asked for. Obviously you can prompt the LLM to only provide critique at that level, but it's also really easy to just let it do a lot more of the work.
But if you know you're prone to getting into conflicts in email, an LLM powered filter on outgoing email that flagged up "hey, you're probably going to regret sending that" mails before they went out the door seems like it might be a helpful tool.
borroka|28 days ago
On the other hand, before LLMs came along, didn't we ask a friend or colleague for their opinion on an email we were about to write to our boss about an important professional or personal matter? I have been asked several times to give advice on the content and tone of emails or messages that some of my friends were about to send. On some occasions, I have written emails on their behalf.
Is it really any different to ask an LLM instead of me? Do I have a better understanding of the situation, the tone, the words, or the content to use?
pm215|28 days ago
Firstly, when you ask a friend or colleague you're asking a favour that you know will take them some time and effort. So you save it for the important stuff, and the rest of the time you keep putting in the effort yourself. With an LLM it's much easier to lean on the assistance more frequently.
Secondly, I think when a friend is giving advice the responses are more likely to be advice, i.e. more often generalities like "you should emphasize this bit of your resume more strongly" or point fixes to grammar errors, partly because that's less effort and partly because "let me just rewrite this whole thing the way I would have written it" can come across as a bit rude if it wasn't explicitly asked for. Obviously you can prompt the LLM to only provide critique at that level, but it's also really easy to just let it do a lot more of the work.
But if you know you're prone to getting into conflicts in email, an LLM powered filter on outgoing email that flagged up "hey, you're probably going to regret sending that" mails before they went out the door seems like it might be a helpful tool.
mettamage|28 days ago