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Comment by kurige | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT and LLMs have had a significant impact on my wife's life. She's a second language speaker, and having ChatGPT available to draft and proofread professional sounding emails and text messages has drastically increased her self-confidence and ability to communicate with colleagues. I think that's amazing.

That's also the only use of LLMs we've found.

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Two uses for me (as a native English speaker who writes pretty well on my own):

1. Reformatting notes or bits of information into something more formal (something I consider actually counterproductive in a way, since formal is often more verbose, but that's expected in certain contexts...)

2. Sifting through the crap of the internet to answer obscure questions. The Google replacement that has been needed.

It's helped me incredibly to proof-read a novel I wrote in Spanish and translated myself into English to make it sound more native. I review ever single suggestion an LLM provides (as I would do with a native proof-reader!).

I think this type of job suits LLMs perfectly... At the end of the day it's just a statistical NLP tool.

For second/new language users, search enabled LLMs are great for finding information. You can instruct it to search in the target language and provide the results in your native language, helping greatly when you're not even sure what the relevant search words are.

I wouldn't trust the analysis on anything important, but that gives you the source links so you can still verify yourself.

The downside to doing this is that you'll sound like an LLM. LLM-generated text is very obvious to anyone with basic reading comprehension and once detected will cause some people to summarily dismiss the sender as a bot.

I think this can be mitigated by proofreading and changing up a few things.

This is more than acceptable if it allows you to confidently send of an email in less than a minute that would otherwise take you 30 minutes of agony to write and still not be confident about.

Also, these aren't cold calls. The recipients aren't critical about how "botty" the email sounds.

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