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Comment by Ecstatify | Hacker News Reader

Our company is pushing everyone to use a similar offering. Most of the company is doing low value work … still using excels even though we have a custom ERP. Now seeing people who couldn’t write a coherent email before write 3 page emails. The illusion of being productive by doing more work even though it has zero impact on the bottom line. It’s insane how inefficient organisations are. No doubt we’ll have some KPI soon about using the tool.

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If anything it's less productive because people have to parse all that nonsense.

I was gobsmacked to hear a friend say that their work guidance is to use ChatGPT to write letters to external clients for example. I know for sure I'd be insulted if someone sent me paragraphs of text to read created from a sentence long prompt. I'd rather have the prompt, my time is valuable as well.

ahhhh, but they're pasting the 3 page email into ChatGPT ("summarize this"). The future is here.

Wouldn't be surprised if that was next Outlook feature.

Cue someone making some horrible error because some crucial information didn't survive ChatGPT->ChatGPT round-trip

it's already here... https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-micr...

Actually this was in an Azure hacktoon some time ago https://devpost.com/software/amabot

Yeah that's one of the insane things that will happen.

Very soon everyone will in effect "hide" behind an agent that will take all kinds of decisions on one's behalf. Everything from writing e-mails to proposals but also to sue someone, make financial decisions, and be a filter that transforms everything going in or out.

I can't imagine this world really. How the hell are people going to compete or stand out? Doesn't it seem that what little meritocracy existed wills soon drown in noise?

I was scared about organizations doing this and losing their connection to the humans they serve.

The realization that individuals will also have this barrier to the world is even scarier.

If it goes that way we could be looking at a change to society on the level of social media, again. Mad.

I write emails and put it into chatgpt and ask it to make it more concise or point out issues. No utility in asking chatgpt to needlessly expand the text...

I think the more common case is to have a handful of bullet points and some notes and ask chat GOT to put into a coherent letter for an external customer with the goal of XYZ. I’ve done similar things and it is a huge timesaver. I still have to edit it, but it gives me a start that’s probably on par to what a Junior engineer would write as a first draft.

Exactly right. If you increase entropy you need energy to reduce it back. It be more valuable to take crap that humans have put together incoherently and summarizing it. (Perhaps someone should put a GPT on the other end in order to read it)

I honestly don’t know why we’re so obsessed with having LLMs generate crap. Especially when they’re very capable of reducing, simplifying. Imagine penetrating legal texts, political bills, obtuse technical writing, academic papers and making sense of those quickly. Much more useful imo.

You'll just have people reversing it into a summary on the other end, kind of like a "text" chat where both sides are using text-to-speech and speech-to-text instead of having a phone call.

The amount of othewise very smart people who completely lose the ability to think critically when it comes to "AI" is really interesting to me.

I'm not anti-AI; I've recommended that we use it at work a few times where it made sense and was backed by evidence/bencharmks. But for essentially any problem that comes up someone will try to solve it with ChatGPT, even if it demonstrably can't do the job. And these are not business folks, these are engineering leaders who absolutely have the capability to understand this technology.

What ERP are you using?

We've found some early success selling to companies with older "long-tail" ERP's. I've been finding a new one every day.

It’s a proprietary ERP completely custom. Think it was deployed through an acquisition. The problem isn’t the ERP it’s the business. “We want custom processes” but hire the cheapest developers possible to maintain the ERP and then complain about bugs. “We’re agile™” … but have the same inefficient processes for the last 3 years. Cargo cult org, the CEO was taking about Black Swans during COVID … even though Nassim Taleb explicitly said COVID wasn’t a black swan event.

I’ve learned that the most important writing skill is to figure out what you’re trying to say — this is a rather important prerequisite to writing well.

Naively asking a chatbot to write for you does not help with this at all.

It would be interesting to try to prompt ChatGPT to ask questions to try to figure out what the user is trying to write and then to write it.

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