alt Hacker NewsI asked it to remove "honest" from a draft once.
"Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest."
I'm going to look for prompts or skills that can train it in technical writing but I'm warning the AI enthusiasts in my company that its first drafts of code and prose are low-quality, you have to hold it to a high standard yourself.
I actually took a single technical writing class in college so I might be the only one who remembers "Omit needless words."
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> "Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest."
I grew up in the US South where starting or ending a sentence with "honest/honestly" was very common.
Because of behavioral / cultural norms, you might be very openly friendly with big smiles around a business customer that really grates on your nerves, or very openly nice to a neighbor that you really wish would move away and take their 3am welding and grinding in their garage with them.
Saying "honest/honestly" was seen as a "inside baseball" situation, where you were dropping social pretenses to tell someone your true opinion on a person or situation or whatever.
This also gets used inside companies between senior staff / management / directors / etc, as: "Okay, company politics and nonsense aside, I am being vulnerable here for a second and telling you what I really think about a $thing at potentially great job/advancement risk to myself".
Can it be meaningless? Yes.
Can the person say "honestly" and lie? Yes.
It has uses.
The road to hell was paved with adverbs.