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Comment by croon | Hacker News Reader

In the example screenshot, the assistant takes this input:

> im interested in this place - do you allow dogs?

and writes this output:

> I'm interested in your property. Its exactly what I've been looking for. To make it perfect for me, I just need to know if the unit is pet-friendly. Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to your response.

The input is concise and to the point, the latter is infuriatingly verbose and formulaic. But I guess it'll be easy to filter out humans I would actually be willing to communicate with.

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My wife makes an living asking people for things.

She writes like the latter example. I find myself continuously frustrated by people. She loves them. I find that I'm constantly rejected when suggesting things, she isn't.

I'm with you, but I think we're wrong.

I was talking to somebody who worked HR at a multi-disciplinary shop, and she said you could always identify the emails coming from programmers

It was a complaint, definitely not a compliment. She said programmers listed things out in bullet points and bluntly to-the-point. She complained they were dry, intimidating, and she hated dealing with them

I still write concisely and with bullet points, when writing to other programmers. But I now expand things when talking to everybody else. And I've found I get better responses

If the HR person wanted to recruit programmers, I feel like that's a feature.

I'm kinda glad, because I hate emails coming from hr.

It shouldn't be terribly surprising that humans incorporate signals beyond pure denotational content of message? Text is a pretty low-bandwidth channel, so we infer as much meaning as possible from the bits of information we receive. All the stylistic choices encode additional information about the sender; part of one's job as an effective communicator is evaluating the effect of all those choices and adapting the entire message (not just its content) to convey the intended impression (not just the meaning).

Incidentally, this is why AI-writing isn't necessarily better communication. The robot can help translate intentions into prose, but it can't decide what one should actually intend to say.

This reminds me of Craigslist. When I get a response that’s written in a terse and grammatically incorrect style, I ignore it. Experience tells me these transactions don’t tend to go well.

This is it. This is why I think AI is a better writer than I am.

The latter also says quite a lot that was just made up and wasn't even implied by the original.

There's a middle ground which is what a normal person would write:

I'm interested in your property, but I have a dog. Will that be a issue? Thank you!

I'm interested in your property, it looks like just what I need. But I need to know if you allow dogs. Thanks!

People are busy. The kind of filler in the AI example shows that you don't value their time more than you value trying to sound sophisticated when making a simple inquiry. But people also don't have time to decipher possibly cryptic text-message-shorthand. Think about your audience, and write accordingly.

We are still working with yes/no questions. While perhaps a landlord may reply with more information, I would phrase them as open-ended: "What can you tell me regarding dog ownership in your community?" That is an invitation to describe pet deposit, size/breed limitations, places to walk them, etc.

It's not only pointlessly verbose, it ruins the intention behind the input! The user wants to know if they allow dogs, not pets. They can get a "yes we allow some pets" response and now they have to start all over to figure out which pets those are, whether dogs are included, etc.

This is a shitload of computational expenditure to make things objectively worse by introducing an entirely new class of problem to the original message. It's literally "I had a problem, so I used AI, and now I have two problems"

Well, we obviously then need a de-verbosifier. In which case, how do you filter for your aforementioned humans?

Why is this downvoted? I consider it and its replies interesting and relevant

If there's an HN policy violation in this post, I'm legit curious what it is

When I take the output apart: The first sentence is to the point and short. The second is potentially redundant but might increase the likelihood of a reply. The third one is perhaps a bit over the top and could be merged shorter with the second (e.g., "... looking for, but I was wondering if ..."). Next one is just basic politeness. Last one feels optional but might at the margin increase likelihood/speed of reply.

Not perfect but not bad either (assuming a human reader on the receiving side).

You can fine-tune LLMs in new styles, without even considering all the styles they are already trained on. The formulaic style response is not needed at all.

The formulaic response in the style of Coding Horror:

"Hey there! Your property has piqued my interest—it's what I've been looking for. Just a tiny detail left to seal the deal: Is the unit cool with pets? Thanks a bunch for your time and consideration. Anticipating your swift response!"

It’s a BSifyer

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