[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.

[TeMPOraL]

Fair enough. A typical e-commerce worker would have templates for half the things you mentioned now, ready to be copy-pasted into e-mail, so I guess ChatGPT would mostly be introducing variety to the canned replies.

[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.