Comment by rty32 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rty32 | Hacker News Reader

> In the first ad, Apple Intelligence enables a goof-off who wastes time and annoys his colleagues to surprise his boss with an unexpectedly well-written email. It’s not clear that the boss is impressed; he just can’t believe the guy would have written a professional message.

This feels... weird. If the ad was released early 2023, it would still be relevant. But hey, we are now at Nov 2024, exactly after two years after ChatGPT was released. Anyone who has been half paying attention to "AI" wouldn't be impressed any more with a formal, professionally written email from anybody. Saying that as someone whose performance review had evidence of being "enhanced" with ChatGPT but didn't find it surprising.

Well, what's more weird is the setup itself. Do bosses expect to read this kind of super formal email from their direct reports? Do people actually write first versions of emails like that? Something is off here. At least I don't think it ever occurred to me that I need to "rewrite an email to my boss using a professional tone" to my direct boss.

Back when ChatGPT first released there was a common meme of people writing up a list of bullet points and converting them into a formal, verbose email via AI, and the receiver then using AI to summarize that email back down to a list of bullet points. I imagine a ton of current use of LLMs is something of this sort.

It’s like the inverse of compression for transmission

It would be cool if the system were integrated enough to just send the list along with it. Then the AI on the receiving could fake summarizing it by just revealing the original list.

Funny as it is, it also hits close to home. Some people[0], at least in some cases[1], may really think in lists (or trees); many (most?) others prefer prose. Turning those structured thoughts into expected prose can sometimes be very time-consuming.

I'm not ashamed to admit that, more than once, I used AI tools to turn a bullet-point-list-shaped brain dump into a first draft of an e-mail. I never sent it out without an almost complete rewrite, though - the point was just to get through the mental block caused by forced thinking mode switch.

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[0] - I suspect software devs more than company average, but I have no hard evidence for that, could be just my bias.

[1] - Myself, often, when my mind is busy processing something else. In those situations, I write even more verbosely than my verbose usual.

> Anyone who has been half paying attention to "AI" wouldn't be impressed any more with a formal, professionally written email from anybody

You’re vastly overestimating the self awareness of the average person.

> Anyone who has been half paying attention to "AI"

I think this is probably aimed at normal people. I expect the tight integration looks much, much more attractive than typing into some random site.

> someone whose performance review had evidence of being "enhanced"

now waiting for the persistent memory GPT where the employees start manipulating things to always give Dave a great review. I can see dave "polluting" the data the GPT is fed, or all other shenanigans to ensure a good review other than actually just doing a good job

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