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by TeMPOraL 1272 days ago
> 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.

1 comments

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.
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.