alt Hacker NewsThis quote from the authors friend really hit home with me.
> “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”
I’m not saying there’s no merit in adding a bit of politeness and professionalism to your communication, which I’m sure the prompt itself lacks. However the root of what you’re trying to convey is the prompt, wrap that in a header and a signature. Not only are we talking as humans, we’re also communicating directly.
Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response. I don’t know why, maybe because it feels not genuine.
Replies
To a friend or colleague, yes. But for quotidian business transactions LLMs are such a shortcut. I pointed one to three Amazon orders that I wanted to return with reasons for each, and asked it to look up the details and generate warranty service request emails for each. A quick review copy paste send, boom done. A 15 minute task done in 5. Repeat and it adds up. But you need to know when not to take the shortcut.
On a good day it's a 240 volt hair clipper for grooming yaks.
I've always assumed when I hear people talking about AI emails, they're talking about longer formal writing to groups, such as a proposal not personal 1:1 messages. Hearing this kind of surprises me but I don't know first-hand since I was able to retire just before LLMs became ubiquitous.
In my experience, 1:1 or 1:2 emails among coworkers, peers or friends tended to be as short and direct as possible anyway. Even pre-LLM, an email as long or structured as an LLM would create today would have been notably weird.
What if there were multiple prompts and a simulated-conversation back and forth as I tried to figure out my own thoughts?
The problem is everything we send that was created from a prompt is not you.
If I wanted to read something that wasn't written by another person, you might as well swap out the from field for "Claude" or "gpt-5" or w/e and stop pretending you had any valuable input.
Sure there's something to be said about having an AI help. But I'd rather that be an attachment clearly labelled and for the content to be strictly reserved for a human.
This is already how I think PRs and such should be written. There should be a field or section of the description reserved for the AI generated content, with the rest being for the human to clearly describe their intention.
But instead we're living in a world of AIs masquerading as humans. And it's only getting worse.
Regarding your last point, I personally find it insulting when I receive an AI response because of the subtle deception involved. When I am talking with another human via Slack/email/etc., I am under the impression that the messages I am receiving are written by the coworker/person in question. When instead I receive an LLM's output, that trust is broken, especially if it is not made transparent that AI was used to generate the message.
I feel bad for this generation who will have to listen to prompted eulogies and wedding toasts. And worse for the genuine writers who now will be accused of having done so.
When I read what someone has written, I learn things beyond its literal text from the fact that I’m reading it, which implies it was worth effort for them to put into so many words and send to me through the medium they chose and put the level of care that they chose into their wording.
The LLM erases those choices and erases the cost of verbosity so there’s much less for me to learn from a message, and much less I stand to learn about a person though repeated exchanges to help me better contextualize future messages I receive from them.
> Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response
I run into this with AI-generated PR comments. I think where I work we are still grappling with the "right point", because LLMs can certainly provide valuable feedback, but they are not at the point where they can do so unsupervised, and to do so just feels unprofessional.
And there's another layer where it is even worse when a colleague spends the time critiquing code and someone (or something) replies to the comment with mostly useless filler. It's like being handed a small hand-crafted gift and then throwing it into the garbage in front of them.
While I tend to agree, if that email were about arranging a D&D session, I don't think I would care. Especially if the alternative is we never find a time to play D&D.
Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response.
If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it.
Yeah, that's one of those sentiments where people say it but they probably don't mean it literally. Much like if your boss asks for honest feedback giving it to them with both barrels is a career limiting move.
You make subtle mistakes in how you perceive the world, the interlocutor makes similar mistakes and the damage those mistakes do is limited if you follow some structural rules of how to communicate (aka politeness).
AIs only rewrite what is in the prompt with more words so it can be insipid but I'd expect to do better on average with that then sending out raw prompts. I'd suggest the real ask from the friend is "put more time into communicating with me than a short prompt".