Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

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I find it so funny that all the articles about this thing are so heavy handed about what you, the reader, are supposed to think about it. The ad is cute and the tech is good tool when you're not sure what kinds of things typically go into a piece of communication. There are lots of implicit rules about what's "supposed" to go into them.

I had to write a letter of recommendation recently and had not done one before so I did literally what happened in the commercial and had gipty write a first draft. I suddenly had a tailor-made scaffold of what the letter was supposed to look like, the expected level of formality, and topics I should cover. I rewrote it using the LLM response as a rough guide and when I sent it out my coworkers praised "how good with words" I am. And ya'know what, I am good with words but I also have a strong voice with an informal talkative tone that is hard to shake when I need to write business-formal. But the LLM has absorbed all those rules and can help me bridge the gap.

Letters of recommendation are one of the best use cases of LLMs because they are, by definition, full of bullshit and formalism, and with very little actual content.

A fan letter, especially one from a child, is the opposite of that. That's the reason so many people find the ad appalling.

> Letters of recommendation are one of the best use cases of LLMs because they are, by definition, full of bullshit and formalism, and with very little actual content.

That's just a poorly written letter of recommendation, then. The letters I've read that were most impactful in terms of advocating for the candidate were specific about the actions and impact of the candidate, and I've written my letters of recommendation in the same fashion.

Look, appalled is a pretty strong reaction to an ad about an AI chatbot that it's hard to take seriously. That footballer who made a speech about how women need to embrace their natural roles as wives and homemakers is appalling, this is at worst "eh, it didn't land for me."

Hey look this kid used a writing assistant to write something— literally dystopian. Grammarly could have made the exact same ad. It seems that there's a group of people who are frothing at the mouth towards anything with the words AI on it and this article is one of them.

Eh, it is appalling I'd say, since it takes out the entire soul of it all. A letter written by an AI is about as touching as receiving a stock photo. And as written in the article, it removes an opportunity from the kid to practice their writing ability.

>That footballer who made a speech about how women need to embrace their natural roles as wives and homemakers is appalling, this is at worst "eh, it didn't land for me."

Did you determine that on your own or did you ask an AI to tell you?

This is the weakest comeback— come on you can do better, I believe in you.

But I guess that makes sense coming from someone who thinks the peak of human intelligence was before we used tools. /jest

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