Please stop sending me emails written by GPT (opens in new tab)

For me, it's a matter of decency. If you're sending me an email and you're expecting that I'll read it, you're asking me to invest my time (presumably for your benefit). But, you're unwilling to make the same investment with your time by using a tool to simulate a human connection. Having excessively long, unedited prose adds insult to injury since you've doubled down on the decision to spend someone else's time as long as it saves yours.

I love these multi-step prompt 'hacks'. They very much take advantage of the fact that this is still 'just' a model predicting the next token.

Asking a model to write an email as if it were written by Hemingway requires the model to generate a probability distribution based on the context of an email it needs to write + the style it needs to write it.

In the second approach, you've changed the model weights/inputs by including the email in the context window, so the task of predicting the next token is fundamentally different (and possibly easier) for the model.

It's also why models are sometimes bad at answering a factual question, but good at judging whether their own answer is correct.

It took more work to write the prompt that it would to write the script email.

“Please write a brief email from an employee to a boss giving an update on the api. The email should include 1. The /customers and /address endpoints are complete, but we're still waiting on the architecture team to finish the /orders spec. I'll also be taking Friday off.”

And then you had to adjust it. Just include the information you out into the prompt. If chatgpt can understand it, so can I.

I can’t wait to live in a world where someone enters bullet points into chatgpt to generate an email. Then I have to run the email through chatgpt to transform it back into bullet points.

The prompt is a much better email than the stuff it produced:

> The /customers and /address endpoints are complete, but we're still waiting on the architecture team to finish the /orders spec. I'll also be taking Friday off.

vs. garbage about gazelles, and the fact that telephones exist.

> I'll also be taking Friday off.

Turns into:

> Come Friday, I won't be in. Just one day. Things will continue, though. Any emergencies, I'm a call away.

Off is off, don't call me. Must have been trained on a lot of linkedin posts to volunteer your personal time like this.

If we can pick a style, I would like the one of Mark Twain :)

Although, I don't know how he would feel about being mimic'ed million-fold.

If I received the second email there I would think the sender was a psychopath

The author is on the receiving end.

There is a parameter called "temperature" that determines randomness. I think there is never a guarantee of the same response, but generally with a low temperature (something like 0.0, the lowest but still not deterministic) I get nearly identical responses, if not actually identical. When temperature is increased though to e.g. default of 1.0 or max of 2.0, the same prompt will give very different responses. The higher the temperature the more creativity that is injected because of the randomness, but also the less determinism.

Honestly, as someone who does this, Bard seems to be much better at writing natural emails. It's just easier to dump some thoughts in to bard and ask it to redraft, then fluff it a little to sound like me.

It's not a random seed, but it will always be slightly different. It's similar to "prompting" a human... you'll likely get the same general result if you ask the same person the same question a dozen times, but it will have enough variability that it won't be identical.

"I promise I will still read it!"

You might read it, but you won't answer the same way as you do when "choose a nice wording." was added to the prompt.

Seriously. We're going to have ChatGPT inflate content, then readers will use AI summarizers to distill it.

Seems like we should all just be communicating via bullet points grug or Kevin Malone style.

>Best bit of the article.

"Tell the person that he's being an idiot asking me to turn on my cameras during the meetings but be subtle about it, I don't want to offend them."

That'll work.

I mean, you can say

- "I really really hate this line"

- "I love that line a little bit, hmm actually I read it a bit more and it started to stink"

- "This line feels a little too Vogue"

- "Can we make this a little more Arnold in Kindergarten Cop"

And it will distill that into something distinctly actionable. You have an interface to communicate your edits in the lowest friction way ever exposed by mankind and people are still trying to enter a prompt and Ctrl+C Ctrl+V.

Count yourself lucky! Last message I got from a recruiter was addressed to {firstname}.

This is just the beginning. Ever since late last year, I estimate that around 25-30% of everyone I ever talked to via some online session where we had to share the screen for something or another, had a ChatGPT tab open. For students this jumps to around 50%.

It's not possible. The current AI detectors are extremely unreliable, whatever people selling them might tell you. You'd probably get fewer false positives by filtering the people who send mail that you think is AI generated.

There is no need to use ChatGPT for that. I suppose running the emails through LanguageTool (or, if you don't care about privacy, Grammarly) and counting the suggestions to fix "too wordy sentences" would be a good approximation.

One would have to accept dealing with the difficulties caused by many false positives.

I would absolutely love this

sender: writes summarized prompt

llm: emits excessively lengthy and polite prose

smtp: transports lengthy prose

llm: summarizes lentghy prose to bullet points

recipient: reads summary

what a wonderful waste of energy

Why bother with getting a summary of the email? Just have it write the response for you blind. Fair's fair.

Feels like everyone is going to take collateral damage one way or another.

Did you told her that she got a card from a digital Cyrano de Bergerac?

So.. all those GPU cycles for inverse compression?

We'll make Nvidia rich in both directions.