The author seems unaware or at least uninterested in the fact that writing style can have a dramatic impact on output. It's unclear if they wish to not be emailed "by ChatGPT" or if they wish to not have to sift through unnecessary and flowery pose.<p>I'll spare you the details, but a follow up "That's great. However, please rewrite it in the style of Ernest Hemingway." delivers concise, yet obviously Hemingway-esque emails. Example here: <a href="https://pastebin.com/rrkCMd8c" rel="nofollow">https://pastebin.com/rrkCMd8c</a> It works much better in a two-step process. If "Write this email in the style of Ernest Hemingway" is affixed to the original prompt, the model will generate prose at length, defeating the purpose of being concise.<p>"That's great. However, please rewrite it in the concise style of Paul Graham," of course, works even better.
> Please if you want to send me a message and feel compelled to use GPT, please just send me whatever you wrote in your prompt instead. I promise I will still read it!<p>Best bit of the article.<p>Question for someone who knows more about this stuff. How likely is it to get the same response to the same prompt with gpt ? Does it have some kind of random seed applied behind the scenes?<p>-edit-
Thank you for the responses. TIL.
"Please if you want to send me a message and feel compelled to use GPT, please just send me whatever you wrote in your prompt instead. I promise I will still read it!"<p>We can dream.
Maybe this is a personal experience. As a non-native English speaker who works in academia. I learned formal English since I was a child. ChatGPT/bard will produce a much quicker formal professional email than I will do. But if I took my time to check the email, I would produce a similar email, which is actually how I normally write if I'm sending an email to a professor or someone else in the field. AI like bard or ChatGPT will be a huge time saver in such cases. However, living in the US for half a decade changed a lot.
From what I've seen so far, the best writers (and, I suppose, the best _editors_) tend to get the best results from ChatGPT. I have seen some examples of people whose writing I already liked drive it in ways I never imagined; but like the author suggest "normies" tend to get piles of drivel.
I've gotten several emails from a recruiter that address me as my last name, all lower caps (Hi swanson, this job..."). It was for an AI company of course.
Emails. Just get to the point and highlight the important details as bullets. Long emails with lots or big paragraphs rarely get read, or at least read properly. Keep it short, on point, to the point.<p>Note. Milage varies based on targets
What is going to happen if people start to increase the length of emails and laws (luckily privacy stuff are being reduced in Europe to be more easily understandable by non-lawyers) to the point where it's like a book, imagine people stop to read them at all, and just use LLMs to ask questions directly, which can still marginally give wrong answers.
It's like bypassing human limit of time, because now people can read few books in like 10-20 min, and so everything can increase too.
I haven't thought too deeply about it, but do we have a moral obligation to be "authentic" when writing something? I.e., writing with our own words instead of using a machine to speak our minds? An email entirely written by chatGPT seems problematic.
"i hope our paths meet again"<p>It would seem as if gestures of kindness are more likely to be fake compared to meanness, criticism, or other negativity. I think this is why 1-3 star reviews are so useful, same for reviews posted to reddit , because they are more critical.
I used ChatGPT to write my wife's Mother's Day card. I had to keep prompting it "now make it funnier" about five times.<p>Then I had to edit it myself because it was still too formal.<p>It didn't matter, she immediately called me out as soon as she read it. :)
I'm sure the output of this LLM could be improved with some hacking but why bother? Are we really at a point where we're nitpicking about the best way to automate away any kind of interpersonal communication?
With the cat out of the bag on these AI tools, the solution will be to have GPT summarize and tag your emails for you to decide if you need to read the whole thing.
finally, my annoying habit (annoying for other people, that is) of typing in terse irc-style with no capitalizations and minimal punctuation comes in handy.
Next people will have GPT4 summarize their mailbox.<p>Ten years from now it will all just be robots mailing each other and no one will understand why things keep breaking.