You can run it through AI to summarize it down to a sentence or two. It's like the telephone game but with computers.

Then why did you even write more than two sentences in the first place, if nothing else matters? Why didn't you write a summary-line at the beginning, consisting of two sentences?

AI will not replace human thinking, even though many people seem to believe and put their brain on stand-by.

It feels like someone wants to transport water from A to B and transports it as steam, just because _we can _.

This is the really hilarious ‘engineer thinking’ vs ‘normie’ thinking difference which rears its head sometimes.

after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?

As long as we can all pretend they were thoughtful and meaningful, and someone isn’t using AI when making it (or just picking random crap off the shelf, and they removed the price tags) or using AI when reading it (aka making a big show of opening it, and then throwing them in the trash immediately after the person leaves), then we all get along. It even looks like we’re doing a ton of work/spending a ton of money to make the other person happy.

Not that anyone does any of the things I’m describing, just being hypothetical, obviously.

I suspect it will be obvious enough shortly it will go the way of the ‘popcorn bucket’ fad or the like, but for now…

I get socks for Christmas and I like it.

Socks are the best gift ever

To quote Tim Minchin, "The old combination of socks, jocks, and chocolates is just fine by me."

Darn Tough from Vermont. Love them socks.

"Normies" actually prefer to get a paragraph long email rather then three pages saying the same thing. AI is NOT adding just a few socially expected niceties. It adds huge amount of fluff.

And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.

> And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.

Exactly that. For me, a lot of effort in structuring e-mails goes into making it look like text instead of bullet points, because some stupid social expectations, but then still making it bullet-pointed in nature, because if I don't, the typical normie recipient will do exactly what you said: ignore majority of it and answer random part.

(And then they'll somehow screw it up anyway, and I'll still have to chase them after that one critical question they conveniently forgot to address.)

Popcorn buckets rocked though. Three kinds of popcorn!

> after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?

Making them feel good and "seen", obviously. This is perfectly expressible in "engineer thinking" (I won't say "quantifiable", because there's this meme that engineers see things in binary, whereas the reality is, math is perfectly fine with fuzzy ideas and uncertainty - it's the normies that can't handle those).

Hell, there are some game-theoretic approaches to maximize social ROI on gifts, but I won't go into those, especially that they tend to flip the sign on the return if the recipient learns about them.

If AI doesn’t replace human thinking, we will have to find something else that does, or just go without.

We’ve invented the worlds dodgiest decompression algorithms

I'll buy the AI LLM that finds the prompt that was used based on the output, and replaces posts and emails by their prompt so I can actually understand the intention of the author and not spend my whole afternoon going through all bullet points with highly redundant information.

/s, of course, but not that unrealistic.

Not that /s, really. If you think about it, what a person writing a long-winded e-mail full of redundant text is doing, is the same work LLM is - they have a prompt in their mind, and they're generating text that "sounds nice" out of it.

AI or not, it would be better if they just sent their prompt instead.

If you don't have the original input, how would you determine the prompt that was used to generate the output?

The process is extremely lossy, but guessing a likely prompt should be doable if they used an LLM just to inflate word count, to reverse it, just remove redundancy and noise. Saves you time.

Yes, when I see something written by AI I don't read it. Its a waste of time.

Cold emails -- especially AI generated ones -- go directly to the trash in my mailbox.

Same here, but AI is orthogonal to that. Spam is spam - there's no difference between one written by silicon-based LLM bot, and one written by protein-based low paid human bot.

That distinct feeling when reading AI is as if someone who wrote it was compelled to write more words

tl;dr: AI is looking to convey words. A good author is looking to efficiently convey information.

Because that's literally what it is. Its an algorithm that is continuously asking itself, 'what is the most likely word I should say next?'

Whereas an author that is intending to communicate a point, will start with an idea, write a passage to explain the idea, and then edit their passage to the minimum number of words that most precisely, accurately, and succinctly communicates that idea.

I'll always love "If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter."

The most scary thing nowadays is that a lot of people fail Reverse Turing Test. They think that the thing there (the LLM) is thinking... They say "I told chat" etc. If high-ranking people will fail the test they are able to start using AI instead of thinking, or for example impose laws using AI...

This is untenable. I could be AI. You could be AI. The whole idea of value is going to change when there is 99.99% noise from AI, and genuine human created content will be hard to distinguish if at all.

There's a trend of people replying to posts/tweets/etc. with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'

It's the modern equivalent of LMGTFY. The OP could just as easily written the same prompt themselves. The difference is that LMGTFY was an expression of irritation, smugness and hazing. The ChatGPT reply is just garrulous laziness. I expect and hope we'll develop social rules that mean this type of reply will be seen as passe.

At least a sarcastic LMGTFY got the person closer to an answer if they clicked the link. Asking ChatGPT is a dead-end.

Even worse is making an original post starting with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'

The last time I got one of those lazy ChatGPT responses I wanted to just ban the person on the spot if I had moderator privileges. Just pages of dreck that looked like detailed information but was totally useless and a waste of time. I don't have a problem if people use ChatGPT and find it helpful, but it's hugely disrespectful to just copy and paste its output to other people without even a cursory review of it first.

My expectation is that:

1: people will use ChatGPT to write their formal emails based on a casually written text 2: people will use ChatGPT to convert their emails from formal text to summaries\ 3: this will get automated by email providers 4: eventually the automation will be removed and we'll just talk in plain language again

I do #1 and it's great. I'm not sure why folks in this thread are sneering at what is a working English transpiler. I don't get to choose having to write formally at work sometimes but I can control how I deal with it.

writing formally doesn't require using a lot of useless filler words though.

Prompt it to be concise, without filler words. It works well enough.

It is funny but it is genuinely a enormous waste of energy and money.