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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

No? The issue is that a tragedy happened and the community wants their leaders to show a shred of empathy. If people found out that the text came from a website selling email templates written by humans, they would still be upset.

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If it came on a Hallmark "special event" card from the grocery store instead, would Hallmark catch flak? Or would this transfer of blame only occur if computers were involved?

Yeah, I remember how things were before yuge public LLM (don't you? it was like a few months ago), and a PR official would have roasted for picking a Hallmark card at anytime in my lifetime.

I think it's exactly the sort of thing an institution might do and it would probably pass without much remark, because people don't actually expect better from office flunkies in PR or HR who are personally detached from the whole situation.

This Valentine's Day my (very corporate) landlord paid somebody to hang a little bag containing confetti, a small twix candy bar and a mechanical pencil on my door. What am I, in third grade? Totally tone deaf, but what can I really expect from a soulless corporation?

You understand how a Valentine’s Day card is different from a response to a mass shooting in which three people were murdered, right?

If I wound up in the hospital with cancer, getting a Hallmark card from HR is precisely the kind of insensitive BS I would expect. This is just the way organizations behave, you need friends/family if you want to receive genuine expressions of empathy.

Nobody seems to blame the LLM itself here.

I don't think anyone is blaming OpenAI, they're blaming the administrators. People would be upset if the administrators had sent a message generated by anything that can't comprehend the magnitude of this particular situation. It's the commoditization of emotion that's the problem here: a delicate situation was pumped through a system to require the least effort by a human possible in a time of great tragedy.

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