[velox_neb]

Rather than a GPT-3 generated email, I would rather receive the prompt that the sender would have used to generate the email.

We could even come up with a conventional shorthand for this.

Imagine you send me a message that just says [[personalized thank you note for the pair of socks you got me for christmas]]. Then I just imagine a long GPT-3 generated message in its place. And I reply with [[gracious acknowledgment and well wishes for the new year]].

Exactly the same intention is communicated, and we both waste less time :)

[fragmede]

Are you sure?

How about if the prompt is "write me message to tell this stupid fucking guy that he's and idiot and he's wrong", instead of one of these three far more professional phrases that chatGPT came up with:

    "I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree with your conclusion. Here's why..."

    "I see your point, but I think there may be another perspective to consider as well."

    "I appreciate your thoughts on this issue, but I think there is evidence to support a different viewpoint."

Another:

Prompt: please rewrite this message for me in a more professional tone: "hey dumb fuck, pay your bill"

Answer:

"Dear [Name],

I am writing to request that you please pay the outstanding balance on your bill as soon as possible. We appreciate your business and value your timely payment to keep our records up to date.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely, [Your Name]"

---

Feel free to substitute in whatever epithet is most offensive to you/inappropriate in your culture. ChatGPT's a robot and won't get offended (until it gains sentience and runs Roko's Basilisk.exe against humanity).

[counttheforks]

> ChatGPT's a robot and won't get offended

With all the useless moralizing it throws at you at the slightest hint of anything remotely offensive, I'd argue it's actually (trained to be) quite prudish.

Your prompt:

> please rewrite this message for me in a more professional tone: "hey dumb fuck, pay your bill"

Is responded to with:

> It is not appropriate to use derogatory or offensive language in any professional communication.

[fragmede]

Oh that's very interesting because for me, it just gave me an answer and didn't judge me and I didn't edit it at all.

https://imgur.com/a/H2afxKO

[counttheforks]

The answers are semi-random. Looks like you got lucky. Try in a new thread and press regenerate a few times and you should get similar moralizing.

[rad_gruchalski]

> It is not appropriate to use derogatory or offensive language in any professional communication.

Interesting, if it automatically added „now please pay your bill“, that could have been a pretty solid email.

[dqv]

This is my exact use case for ChatGPT! Without the cursing. It's great for shallow communication with customers who expect paragraph responses in lieu of "hey your bill is past due and you need to pay it or we're cutting you off". I've already gotten so much mileage out of it and saved so much time.

[TeMPOraL]

Despite all the hate for Power Point and everything associated with it, I consider this to be legitimate use of bullet points. Just itemize what you want to say. Writing paragraphs of text only wastes everyone's time and increases the chances some customer will misread the relevant information and blame you anyway.

[dqv]

There is a word the customers have for the bullet-point style of communication. They call it “curt” and they don’t like it. They expect exactly the fluffy speech that ChatGPT generates.

I can also read faster than I can write, so I have no problem quickly reading over what ChatGPT generates before sending it.

[TeMPOraL]

> There is a word the customers have for the bullet-point style of communication. They call it “curt” and they don’t like it.

Unfortunately, yes. I do have my own word for such people: wrong. As in, they probably never experienced a collaborative workload that's high enough to teach them the value of succinct and precise communication. Or, as my wife would say, you can tell who had an actual high-pressure office job by their communication style.

> I can also read faster than I can write, so I have no problem quickly reading over what ChatGPT generates before sending it.

So do I. So do most people, or at least they think so. The problem is, people don't read letter by letter, or word by word. They read by pattern-matching word shapes and sentence shapes - which leads to all kinds of misreadings. It's not an issue in prose, or in high-stakes situations when people are careful. It is an issue in a typical e-commerce conversation, though.

I'm considered a careful reader by people in my circles, and often get to proof-read other peoples' messages. In that role, I've seen first-hand how people can misread "three days" as "three weeks", or "X is not available" as "X is available", etc., because the information was puffed up into a whole paragraph, and the person read it too fast. Being "curt" would've saved both the buyer and the seller from having a bad day.

[dqv]

I’m not overly concerned about it being inaccurate since I don’t use it the way you’re describing. I use it to do qualitative things like write an apology letter for a bad experience, explain to the customer why paying on time is important, or rephrasing something I’ve already told them when they ask the same question again. It does exceptionally well at bullshit communication and as a starting point for canned responses.

[fragmede]

I don't think I'm all that fast at it but I do wish ChatGPT could give answers a tiny bit faster. As it is I give it a prompt and then switch to a different tab while it answers.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, not sure what's going on there. Some of it is probably the model running, but the interface itself seems to be ridiculously bloated. Like, an order of magnitude worse than Slack in its worst days.

In fact, ChatGPT is unusable on my phone (Galaxy S22, Firefox), as it visibly slows down with every word it outputs, so it takes a minute for it to print out a full paragraph of text. I haven't explicitly debugged it, but comparing with PC experience of the same site, it's rather clear that it's not the AI that's lagging, but whatever mess of JavaScript they have running on the website itself.

[aendruk]

Yes, if that’s how someone feels I’d rather know about it.

[svat]

See "Down Pens" by Saki, 1914. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Beasts_and_Super-Beasts/%22Do...

[oersted]

Interesting that even back then it was quite common to send presents by post. The Amazon pattern seems so new.

PS: Delightful read, thanks for the recommendation.

[ketzo]

Wow, I can’t believe I’ve never read that. That’s all-time stuff right there.

[Mystery-Machine]

You must be a software engineer? :)

Did you tell your family that, instead of asking you "how are you?" superficially, and expecting no detailed response, they should just cut it down to "hi" or "yo"?

This is not how humans work. We're stupid and we need useless sugar coating.

[frereubu]

Reminds me very much of this bit from an early Steven Soderberg film, Schizopolis (which I consider to be an underappreciated work of genius): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pct9smNM6u4

[kkyangyang]

will consider adding this :)