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".
I am not the author but I have used that quote before, and no, I mean it literally. I would prefer any words that came from your own brain over the output of a statistical model. I don't mind if it's short, or didn't take much time, or doesn't have much thought put into it, I want it to be yours. The subtle mistakes in how my interlocutor perceives the world and communicates themselves are the entire point.
I had a case in my job of an HR guy that was so bad a communication everything was super confusing and we always had issues and tension.
Once GPT came out he clearly just copy / pasted LLM output and I was very conflicted because it felt insulting but it was the first time I was actually able to understand what he intended to say...
I sadly would prefer LLM output over prompt because I'm pretty sure the prompting was a process with him he would prompt, get a bad LLM output, seeing the LLM wasn't understanding force him to clarify and we ended up with actually understandable content.
I would rather my reports tell me to fuck off than to generate something telling me to fuck off in polite but insincere terms full of emojis and em dashes. Honesty is valuable.
I too would much rather that, because then I get to know them as unhelpful whining complainers and fire them. That's not a great outcome for that person though.
> You make subtle mistakes in how you perceive the world, the interlocutor makes similar mistakes
And the LLM makes subtle mistakes perceiving what you were trying to say, and I make subtle mistakes perceiving what the LLM generated.
It's interesting that you seem to think an LLM would be better than you at understanding what someone was trying to say. I have complete, 100% certainty that if a personal friend of mine was having trouble expressing themselves and was concerned about being misunderstood, I would understand what they were trying to say better than any existing LLM. (I suppose the exception would be if the friend was referencing some factual matter I'm unaware of but that the LLM has memorized, like a pop culture reference I didn't get or something.) Do you find that ChatGPT has more emotional intelligence than you?
That may be. But we often find ourselves communicating with people who are not close friends. And the concern may well be the opposite -- a desire to find and scrub ambiguity from one's own message.
Emotional intelligence includes things like being able to perceive and manage your own emotions; it is hard to know what that would mean for an LLM. They don't have hormones or much of an ego. They also aren't usually in a position to perceive body language or tone.
But in terms of reading comprehension I haven't seen anyone who does a better job than an AI. It's a skill that technically caps out quite quickly, all you can really do is restate what someone already said and make inferences off that.
> I have complete, 100% certainty that if a personal friend of mine was having trouble expressing themselves and was concerned about being misunderstood, I would understand what they were trying to say better than any existing LLM.
Your personal circumstances are a mystery and close friends are typically people we're associating with because they think in fundamentally compatible ways. So sure, why not. But assuming a more-or-less normal person I expect an LLM would outperform them. LLMs are relentless about being reasonable and focusing on what was actually said in a way that most people usually need a bit of training to accomplish.
I would absolutely prefer just getting the raw prompt. Emails are already ridden with enough completely unnecessary parts that are somehow still the cultural norm (eg. signatures). At least let the important part be to the point. I yearn for a world where people write emails the same way they write text messages.
We've been writing business emails for 40+ years. Anyone with -2 stddev IQ and above would know to tweak a 10-word prompt to a more polite version before sending it
I've been going back and forth on this, and I think I agree with you about 95%. But for some cases, where I don't really have a choice about whether or not I'm going to hear from you, there are certain dullards that I'd rather have filtered through a chat bot. It really would be an improvement over whatever they had to say. Listening to their genuine human output has negative value, but filtered through an LLM might bring that value up to zero.
This might apply to the AI integrations in Gmail, but someone's own agent setup might have more references saved privately than yours. You can't ask your AI to search through my personal notes.
The people that send that crap are the guys who one-off it, not the guys who have a carefully crafted context, skills, and local references on top of the prompt.
> if your boss asks for honest feedback giving it to them with both barrels is a career limiting move
Or, from another point of view, expanding your career's event horizon. Imagine how much longer you might have languished in that stifling, stagnant job if you hadn't unloaded on the boss?
> I'd suggest the real ask from the friend is "put more time into communicating with me than a short prompt"
That's where the real truth is. If you're communicating in short prompt messages, did you really even have a thought worth communicating?
I sometimes abort writing an email when I can't think of a polite and constructive way to express my opinion. I have never once regretted aborting such email. I'll often come back to it later, with much better thoughts and an actual constructive point to write down, and then I never struggle with the "style" of the message.
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".