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321 points distantprovince | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.255s | source
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phito ◴[] No.44617442[source]
I really wish some of my coworkers would stop using LLMs to write me emails or even Teams messages. It does feel extremely rude, to the point I don't even want to read them anymore.
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pyman ◴[] No.44617880[source]
Didn't our parents go through the same thing when email came out?

My dad used to say: "Stop sending me emails. It's not the same." I'd tell him, "It's better. "No, it's not. People used to sit down and take the time to write a letter, in their own handwriting. Every letter had its own personality, even its own smell. And you had to walk to the post office to send it. Now sending a letter means nothing."

Change is inevitable. Most people just won't like it.

A lot of people don't realise that Transformers were originally designed to translate text between languages. Which, in a way, is just another way of improving how we communicate ideas. Right now, I see two things people are not happy about when it comes to LLMs:

1. The message you sent doesn't feel personal. It reads like something written by a machine, and I struggle to connect with someone who sends me messages like that.

2. People who don't speak English very well are now sending me perfectly written messages with solid arguments. And honestly, my ego doest’t like it because I used to think I was more intelligent than them. Turns out I wasn't. It was just my perception, based on the fact that I speak the language natively.

Both of these things won't matter anymore in the next two or three years.

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aidos ◴[] No.44617893[source]
I really don’t think they’re the same thing. Email or letter, the words are yours while an LLM output isn’t.
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1. drweevil ◴[] No.44618779[source]
That is indeed the crux of it. If you write me an inane email, it’s still you, and it tells me something about you. If you send me the output of some AI, have I learned anything? Has anything been communicated? I simply can’t know. It reminds me a bit of the classic philosophical thought experiment "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Hence the waste of time the author alludes to. The only comparison to email that makes any sense in this case are the senseless chain mails people used to forward endlessly. They have that same quality.