If I wanted to read something that wasn't written by another person, you might as well swap out the from field for "Claude" or "gpt-5" or w/e and stop pretending you had any valuable input.
Sure there's something to be said about having an AI help. But I'd rather that be an attachment clearly labelled and for the content to be strictly reserved for a human.
This is already how I think PRs and such should be written. There should be a field or section of the description reserved for the AI generated content, with the rest being for the human to clearly describe their intention.
But instead we're living in a world of AIs masquerading as humans. And it's only getting worse.
In my experience, 1:1 or 1:2 emails among coworkers, peers or friends tended to be as short and direct as possible anyway. Even pre-LLM, an email as long or structured as an LLM would create today would have been notably weird.
If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it.
Probably the best response would be "No." The least anticipated one, creating a chance of actual communication.
I understand where you're coming from but please believe me when I tell you that if I write comments myself nobody will understand them and it just turns into an argument where people claim I say things that I didn't say.
By filtering my comments through an llm, I have reduced this issue significantly.
What we said here applies to the general population, not such special cases.
Of course, if a dyslexic lets it do more than correct typos and grammar/syntax, the "don't send me LLM crap" also applies to them!
And even for non-native speakers, I'd prefer to get their actual output, not the LLM version.
I don’t think that’s dyslexia.
> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
"Fix my shit so others can read it" is different than "gimme a comment to respond counter to the thread"
On a good day it's a 240 volt hair clipper for grooming yaks.
You make subtle mistakes in how you perceive the world, the interlocutor makes similar mistakes and the damage those mistakes do is limited if you follow some structural rules of how to communicate (aka politeness).
AIs only rewrite what is in the prompt with more words so it can be insipid but I'd expect to do better on average with that then sending out raw prompts. I'd suggest the real ask from the friend is "put more time into communicating with me than a short prompt".
I sadly would prefer LLM output over prompt because I'm pretty sure the prompting was a process with him he would prompt, get a bad LLM output, seeing the LLM wasn't understanding force him to clarify and we ended up with actually understandable content.
And the LLM makes subtle mistakes perceiving what you were trying to say, and I make subtle mistakes perceiving what the LLM generated.
It's interesting that you seem to think an LLM would be better than you at understanding what someone was trying to say. I have complete, 100% certainty that if a personal friend of mine was having trouble expressing themselves and was concerned about being misunderstood, I would understand what they were trying to say better than any existing LLM. (I suppose the exception would be if the friend was referencing some factual matter I'm unaware of but that the LLM has memorized, like a pop culture reference I didn't get or something.) Do you find that ChatGPT has more emotional intelligence than you?
But in terms of reading comprehension I haven't seen anyone who does a better job than an AI. It's a skill that technically caps out quite quickly, all you can really do is restate what someone already said and make inferences off that.
> I have complete, 100% certainty that if a personal friend of mine was having trouble expressing themselves and was concerned about being misunderstood, I would understand what they were trying to say better than any existing LLM.
Your personal circumstances are a mystery and close friends are typically people we're associating with because they think in fundamentally compatible ways. So sure, why not. But assuming a more-or-less normal person I expect an LLM would outperform them. LLMs are relentless about being reasonable and focusing on what was actually said in a way that most people usually need a bit of training to accomplish.
You've clearly never seen a CoPilot summary of a Teams meeting.
I would also prefer anyone sending me the AI output and not either their ideas or their prompt, to not contant me ever again.
If I wanted the output of the AI, I'd ask it myself. You're just a useless intermediary if you send it to me.
We've been writing business emails for 40+ years. They'd know to tweak a 10-word prompt to a more polite version before sending it
I don't even know where to start. Long story short: you're wrong.
Or, from another point of view, expanding your career's event horizon. Imagine how much longer you might have languished in that stifling, stagnant job if you hadn't unloaded on the boss?
That's where the real truth is. If you're communicating in short prompt messages, did you really even have a thought worth communicating?
I sometimes abort writing an email when I can't think of a polite and constructive way to express my opinion. I have never once regretted aborting such email. I'll often come back to it later, with much better thoughts and an actual constructive point to write down, and then I never struggle with the "style" of the message.
I run into this with AI-generated PR comments. I think where I work we are still grappling with the "right point", because LLMs can certainly provide valuable feedback, but they are not at the point where they can do so unsupervised, and to do so just feels unprofessional.
And there's another layer where it is even worse when a colleague spends the time critiquing code and someone (or something) replies to the comment with mostly useless filler. It's like being handed a small hand-crafted gift and then throwing it into the garbage in front of them.
If my name is posting something, I understand it. If I can read an LLM response and reword it, I understand it.
I really want copying LLM prose into anywhere without a block quote to be a firable offense.
The LLM erases those choices and erases the cost of verbosity so there’s much less for me to learn from a message, and much less I stand to learn about a person though repeated exchanges to help me better contextualize future messages I receive from them.
I wonder if there could be just some type of open agreement we're both using LLM and then they can communicate with one another more effectively.
I'm yet to experience this, but it reminds me of an interaction I'd regularly have with a younger friend I no longer spend much time with, who would take my in-real-life casual conversation prompts that attempted to engage him in inconsequential curious dialogue, and simply google the answers in front of me.
He'd sort of deliver that response in such a way that it seemed like he assumed I either didn't know the definition of some common term or fact and he was unlocking new information on my behalf, or that I thought he didn't know and revealed a possible weakness in his knowledge of trivia. In reality I was embarrassed by proxy because I had unintentionally provoked a smug, emotional response from someone who wasn't able to contend well with ambiguity, revealed how dependent they were on their phone, and who's first instinct was deeply uncharitable and lacking in curiosity. It led to some awkward situations where I had to explain that I wasn't trying to test them in a battle of intellect, but rather ask what they personally thought or how they used a term who's actual dictionary definition is rarely relevant to it's usage. I tried to find a way to adapt to this incompatibility by thinking about different ways I could communicate with this friend that would indicate my intention to basically just get them yapping more clearly, but never found a way that clicked.
I fear that dependence on various LLM chat tools will lead to more of this sort of problematic thinking and introduce increasingly challenging communication conflicts across otherwise not so distinct age groups. Banter that's intended to be playful will continue to devolve into two sides having no clue what the other means or if they're joking or exaggerating or what, linguistic flourishes, colloquialisms, or regional differences, will become more difficult to execute upon despite there being no intrinsic reason for an incompatibility to exist.
Less akin to knowledge of memes or slang, and moreso to the prevalence of new-irony among people under the age of 23ish who don't know any other type of irony and vice-versa with older -> younger. Things could get weird
Ironically the people I have talked to that do this are actually trying to give you their very best at communicating, at least better than they think they can do. Which may or may not be true. I know being a bit on the spectrum that my comms don't always convey the "tone" that I mean, despite what I'm thinking when writing it.
I wouldn't say "not genuine", I would instead say "not mindful" or "not meaningful".
maybe not quite "mindless" and "meaningless", but maybe 10%.
That was less than 30 years ago. Cell service is more reliable today than then, but it's not perfect, and not only don't we think twice about making <whatever> calls on a cell phone, many/most of us don't even have land lines anymore.
Sending the prompt is the difference between showing up with flowers, and saying, "I feel strongly enough about you to bring flowers."
It's because it's a pretty safe bet that the prompt either implicitly or explicitly says "I don't really care," and the act of using AI to generate the response is almost entirely an effort to conceal that.
In my experience, the people who actually wanted to improve the presentation of their messages are upfront about it and clearly say they're using AI to organize their thoughts or polish their english.
Most generative models can be run in reverse by algorithms that already exist [0], but you have to have the model weights. For closed-weight models, or for a process that can handle unknown models, you’d have to do some engineering.
But do we have the technology to build models that back out the prompt from suspected AI output? Yes.
0. I don’t mean that most neural networks are invertible functions. They’re not. But you can do backprop in reverse, from output to input, to train a model to generate an input to the original model that best predicts its output.
What prompt constructs the output ‘The answer is 3’ or ‘Yes that’s a great idea’?
For a neural network that is not bijective, you can obtain an input that maps to a desired output by the following algorithm.
1. Start with a trained neural network. (The weights will not change throughout this procedure.)
2. Pick a random input.
3. Given an output for which you want to compute an associated input, feed the input into the network to compute the output.
4. Compute the loss of the computed output relative to the target output (e.g., mean-square error). If the loss is sufficiently small, you’ve found an input that maps to an output close to your target output and you’re done.
5. Otherwise, compute the gradient of the loss with respect to the input (e.g., by backprop).
6. Update the input according to a gradient-update rule. And go back to Step 3.
In theory, you can recover a “representative” prompt for the output of an LLM in this manner. For outputs that could have been generated by a large set of disparate prompts, obviously this won’t work well.
I'm sure "please analyse this email and explain why this complete moron is wrong, write as if addressing someone with the comprehension of a 5 year old", would be happily received by my boss.
You probably should find it insulting when someone obviously didn't take the time needed to form a proper response. Prompting "write something apologetic and kind for not attending their wedding" and sending the response is not okay. Like this example, it's easy to recognize when being a human counts, we should also be able to justify automating stuff when it really is just boring information exchange.
Writing important emails used to be a 1-2 hour occasion, nowadays only 15 minutes, but surely not 10 seconds.
It is certainly insulting, I see it more of a malicious compliance way of working.
It’s like receiving a letter and then demanding to see someone’s private notebook where they jot down their thoughts, so you can see what they ‘really meant to say’. Most communication involves a degree of negotiation and persuasion. Thoughts are necessarily private.
There is a problem with AI generated emails: they change the balance of time/effort required to write them vs. to read them. I think this is a valid concern.
The private act of thinking does not involve a round trip to a corporation's servers; that would make the whole term meaningless.
Firstly, this is just wrong. People can and do search stuff online as they're writing something up.
Second, your distinction is the one that's meaningless. The LLM could be running locally on a private machine...
2. It could; it basically never is though, so let's deal with the general case.
Just because someone says/writes something to you doesn’t mean you have any moral right to see all the things they considered and then decided not to say.
Too many words per idea shows me that they're trying to hide something, manage or manipulate me, or play some other game.
> “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
I’m not saying there’s no merit in adding a bit of politeness and professionalism to your communication, which I’m sure the prompt itself lacks. However the root of what you’re trying to convey is the prompt, wrap that in a header and a signature. Not only are we talking as humans, we’re also communicating directly.
Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response. I don’t know why, maybe because it feels not genuine.