Ask HN: Is it polite to respond to colleagues using ChatGPT?

In the situation you described, it is understandable that the salesperson might feel frustrated or perceive the use of ChatGPT as a sign of apathy. When addressing negative feedback, it is crucial to demonstrate genuine concern, empathy, and a willingness to engage in meaningful dialogue. An AI-generated response, even if well-crafted, may lack the personal connection and emotional intelligence needed to effectively address the salesperson&#x27;s concerns.<p>While your direct report&#x27;s intentions to act on the feedback are commendable, it may be more appropriate for them to craft a personalized response that directly addresses the salesperson&#x27;s specific concerns and demonstrates a sincere commitment to improvement. This approach can help foster trust, build stronger relationships, and show that the feedback is being taken seriously.<p>In summary, while ChatGPT can be a useful tool in certain situations, it is essential to consider the context and the potential impact on interpersonal relationships. In sensitive situations like addressing negative feedback, a personalized, human-crafted response may be more effective in demonstrating genuine care and commitment to resolving the issue at hand.

From the context you gave, that sounds inappropriate and rude. If you&#x27;re going to do this, you need to at least put in the effort to rewrite it in your own voice so it&#x27;s not obvious. Also, ChatGPT output tends to be <i>way</i> too verbose, and replying to people with a novella when a short answer will do is inconsiderate as well.<p>That said, for technical issues I will sometimes include clearly labeled ChatGPT output that suggests possible causes, things to try, etc. This doesn&#x27;t feel much different that including a bunch of potentially relevant links from e.g. stack overflow or GitHub issues, which I also do frequently.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s ok to reply with something like &quot;Here are my thoughts... [your take], and by the way I asked ChatGPT about this to get another perspective, and here&#x27;s the output:...&quot; You just shouldn&#x27;t try to pass off ChatGPT output as a valid reply unedited and without context.

I wouldn’t believe the employee sincerely wants to improve if he can’t be bothered to write his own letter. I’d question if he even understands the criticism.<p>If someone did that to me they would end up on my shit list and it would take them along time to find their way off of it. It would speak to their character in my book. I’d read it as, they don’t care, they have poor judgement, and will take any shortcut they can, regardless of the potential for negative impact.

I don&#x27;t know about inappropriate, but if I got a chatGPT response like that, I&#x27;d absolutely take it in the same way as that salesperson did. At best, it would come off as insincere. At worst, as a sign of disrespect.

I use ChatGPT and similar tools like Grammarly to improve my writing and expand on ideas. It’s important to review any output from the models and consider how closely it matches my intentions. Likewise, I’ll usually revise the output rather than using it verbatim. Additionally, these tools can be helpful when writing in a language that is not our mother tongue or in situations we are unfamiliar with.<p>So, I think it’s legitimate to use these tools in personal and professional communications, with the caveat that we should review and revise the output.

There is insufficient information to answer the question. Based on the description, it seems the accused might have had good intentions.<p>Consider the possibility that the accused has social skills challenges and was making an honest effort to communicate effectively.<p>I have a Raycast extension that takes highlighted text as input and runs it through ChatGPT 4 Turbo to simplify, correct, and improve my writing.<p>In fact, I just ran it on this comment.

&gt;I manage a tech team, and one of my direct reports replied to a negative feedback received from a member of our sales team with support from ChatGPT.<p>You&#x27;re allowing sales people to give negative feedback to your people? Aka you&#x27;re letting the sales person manage your people for you? You&#x27;re allowing them to damage your team&#x27;s morale? Yikes I&#x27;d be putting a stop to that asap.<p>&gt;The content of the response was good, as it acknowledged the negative feedback and demonstrated a desire to improve.<p>Then the way I take it is that this direct report hasnt done anything wrong, there&#x27;s no policies violated and so the new discussion is why the sales person is spitting in your face and disrespecting you as their manager.<p>&gt;However, the salesperson noticed that the reply he received was clearly generated through ChatGPT, and he was somewhat frustrated by this.<p>Whether or not this is true, using tools to more efficiently do your job is a pro, not a con.<p>&gt;Do you think using ChatGPT in this situation was inappropriate?<p>Communication skills are never going to be perfect across your team. You should encourage people to use chatgpt to better understand what the other person said and to better formulate the answer they are going to give. The world is rapidly pushing people to use &quot;AI&quot; because of the obvious benefits. Society is not going the other direction which the sales person is attempting.<p>This to me has virtually nothing to do with this direct report in my opinion. This is a sales person managing your person over you. I would immediately go their manager and express the morale damaging negative feedback is to be directed at you from now on.

&gt; Do you think using ChatGPT in this situation was inappropriate?<p>Of course, what ever the bot generated communicates to the human who received that message (and was able to discern the &quot;voice&quot; of the LLM), without words, that the receiver didn&#x27;t think of it as high enough priority to actually engage in a conversation. The LLM might have gone through the motions, but why on earth would that salesperson think that your report (to whom the feedback was directed) actually <i>means</i> what stochastic parrot barfed out. Frankly, I would also assume the opposite. Using a GenAI communicates, you are not worthy of my precious keystrokes. Or as McLuhan said: The medium is the message.

ChatGPT is just a tool. If ChatGPT was used to craft the response to make it more polite or make the reply more professional then the intentions were sincere and the use was appropriate. If it was used to produce a quick and generic response then that would be less appropriate.

Yeah that’s a bad look. The subtext your team gave off here is that it wasn’t worth your time to understand the complaint and seriously respond to it.

Smart&#x2F;Intelligent people are capable of writing the exact same thing but without tools. If they can get away with it, so should people who need tools.

There&#x27;s nothing wrong with using these AI tools. However, if the method of service provision causes discomfort to the person being served, then I think there may need to be improvements in the approach.

I think he should have only used the ChatGPT to get an idea, but his response should have been in his own words.<p>Using an LLM in the way he did gives a signal that he does not really care.

Do you think the salespersons feedback was generated by ChatGPT? How would you feel if ALL the feedback was ChatGPT generated and not anyone&#x27;s real opinion?

Who cares? it’s just a salesperson not a real person. —-chatGPT

[a random internet opinion]<p>If the salesperson provided negative feedback by email instead of in realtime with their voice, ChatGPT is not particularly rude.<p>Email is case-making via putting-it-in-writing. ChatGPT is a reasonable means of adding to the written record.<p>And to be clear, the salesperson is case-making. That&#x27;s why they escalated to you. It&#x27;s primadrama not teamwork. Good luck.

inappropriate? depends. hilarious? fuck yes haha.