alt Hacker NewsI tread carefully with anyone that by default augments their (however utilitarian or conventionally bland) messages with language models passing them as their own. Prompting the agent to be as concise as you are, or as extensive, takes just as much time in the former case, and lacks the underlying specificity of your experience/knowledge in the latter.
If these were some magically private models that have insight into my past technical explanations or the specifics of my work, this would be a much easier bargain to accept, but usually, nothing that has been written in an email by Gemini could not have been conceived of by a secretary in the 1970s. It lacks control over the expression of your thoughts. It's impersonal, it separates you from expressing your thoughts clearly, and it separates your recipient from having a chance to understand you the person thinking instead of you the construct that generated a response based on your past data and a short prompt. And also, I don't trust some misandric f*ck not to sell my data before piping it into my dataset.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: when messaging personally, summarizing short messages is unnecessary, expanding on short messages generates little more than semantic noise, and everything in between those use cases is a spectrum deceived by the lack of specificity that agents usually present. Changing the underlying vague notions of context is not only a strangely contortionist way of making a square peg fit an umbrella-shaped hole, it pushes around the boundaries of information transfer in a way that is vaguely stylistic, but devoid of any meaning, removed fluff or added value.
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Writing an email with AI and having the recipient summarize it with AI is basically all the fun of jpeg compression, but more bandwidth instead of less.
Why can’t the LLM just learn your writing style from your previous emails to that person?
Or a your more general style for new people.
It seems like Google at least should have a TONNE of context to use for this.
Like in his example emails about being asked to meet - it should be checking the calendar for you and putting in if you can / can’t or suggesting an alt time you’re free.
If it can’t actually send emails without permission there’s less harm with giving an LLM more info to work with - and it doesn’t need to get it perfect. You can always edit.
If it deals with the 80% of replies that don’t matter much then you have 5X more time to spend on the 20% that do matter.
There's a whole lot of people who struggle to write professionally or when there's any sort of conflict (even telling your boss you won't come to work). It can be crippling trying to find the right wording and certainly take far longer than writing a prompt. AI is incredible for these people. They were never going to express their true feelings anyway and were just struggling to write "properly" or in a way that doesn't lead to misunderstandings. If you can just smash out good emails without a second thought, you wouldn't need it.
>As I mentioned above, however, a better System Prompt still won't save me much time on writing emails from scratch.
>The thing that LLMs are great at is reading text and transforming it, and that's what I'd like to use an agent for.
Interestingly, the OP agrees with you here and noted in the post that the LLMs are better at transforming data than creating it.
A lot of people would love to have a 1970s secretary capable of responding to many mundane requests without any guidance.
AI for writing or research is useful like a dice roll. Terence Tao famously showed how talking to an LLM gave him an idea/approach to a proof that he hadn't immediately thought of (but probably he would have considered it eventually). The other day I wrote an unusal, four-word neologism that I'm pretty sure no one has ever seen, and the AI immediately drew the correct connection to more standard terminology and arguments used, so I did not even have to expand/explain and write it out myself.
I don't know but I am considering the possibility that even for everyday tasks, this kind of exploratory shortcut can be a simple convenience. Furthermore, it is precisely the lack of context that enables LLMs to make these non-human, non-specific connective leaps, their weakness also being their strength. In this sense, they bode as a new kind of discursive common-ground--if human conversants are saying things that an LLM can easily catch then LLMs could even serve as the lowest-common-denominator for laying out arguments, disagreements, talking past each other, etc. But that's in principle, and in practice that is too idealistic, as long as these are built and owned as capitalist IPs.
Aside from saving time, I'm bad at writing. Especially emails. I often open ChatGPT, paste in the whole email chain, write out the bullets of the points I want to make and ask it to draft a response which frames it well.
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Agreed! As i mentioned in the piece I don't think LLMs are very useful for original writing because instructing an agent to write anything from scratch inevitably takes more time than writing it yourself.
Most of the time I spend managing my inbox is not spent on original writing, however. It's spent on mundane tasks like filtering, prioritizing, scheduling back-and-forths, introductions etc. I think an agent could help me with a lot of that, and I dream of a world in which I can spend less time on email and finally be one of those "inbox zero" people.