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Comment by allturtles | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. Why do you need an AI for messages like "My daughter has the flu and I won't be in today" or "Yes 2pm at Shake Shack sounds good"? You just literally send that.

Do you really run these things through an AI to burden your reader with pointless additional text?

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100% agree. Email like you’re a CEO. Saves your time, saves other people’s time and signals high social status. What’s not to like?

MY CEO sends the "professional" style email to me regularly - every few months. I'm not on his staff, so the only messages the CEO sends me are sent to tens of thousands of other people, translated into a dozen languages. They get extensive reviews for days to ensure they say exactly what is meant to be said and are unoffensive to everyone.

Most of us don't need to write the CEO email ever in our life. I assume the CEO will write the flu message to his staff in the same style of tone as everyone else.

I think you might be misunderstanding the suggestion - typically when people say "email like a CEO" they're talking about direct 1:1 or small group communications (specifically the direct and brief style of writing popular with busy people in those communications), not the sort of mass-distribution PR piece that all employees at a large enterprise might receive quarterly.

For contrast:

"All: my daughter is home sick, I won't be in the office today" (CEO style)

"Hi everyone, I'm very sorry to make this change last minute but due to an unexpected illness in the family, I'll need to work from home today and won't be in the office at my usual time. My daughter has the flu and could not go to school. Please let me know if there are any questions, I'll be available on Slack if you need me." (not CEO style)

An AI summary of the second message might look something like the first message.

The problem is your claim is false in my experience. Every email I've got from the CEO reads more like the second, while all my coworkers write things like the first. Again though I only get communications from the CEO in formal situations where that tone is demanded. I've never seen a coworker write something like the second.

I know what you are trying to say. I agree that for most emails that first tone is better. However when you need to send something to a large audience the second is better.

Being so direct is considered rude in many contexts.

It's that consideration that seems to be the problem.

The whole article is about AI being bullied into actually being direct

Yeah, the examples in the article are terrible. I can be direct when talking to my boss. "My kid is sick, I'm taking the day off" is entirely sufficient.

But it's handy when the recipient is less familiar. When I'm writing to my kid's school's principal about some issue, I can't really say, "Susan's lunch money got stolen. Please address it." There has to be more. And it can be hard knowing what that needs to be, especially for a non-native speaker. LLMs tend to take it too far in the other direction, but you can get it to tone it down, or just take the pieces that you like.

>When I'm writing to my kid's school's principal about some issue, I can't really say, "Susan's lunch money got stolen. Please address it." There has to be more.

Why?

I mean this sincerely. Why is the message you quoted not enough?

Manners. It's just rude if I'm not somewhat close to the person.

I see. It's impolite to be direct? But it's polite to be flowery and avoid what you're actually trying to say?

I don't always _feel_ autistic, but stuff like this reminds me that I'm not normal.

I hear you. I get it enough to know it’s needed, but actually doing it can be hard. LLMs can be nice for that.

Being too flowery and indirect is annoying but not impolite. If you overdo it then people may still get annoyed with you, but for different reasons. For most situations you don’t need too much, a salutation and a “I hope you’re doing well” and a brief mention of who you are and what you’re writing about can suffice.

There’s an argument that being intentionally annoying is impolite.

Oh come on it takes longer to work out how to prompt it to say it how you want it then check the output than it does to write a short email already.

And we’re talking micro optimisation here.

I mean I’ve sent 23 emails this year. Yeah that’s it.

They are automatically drafted when the email comes in, and you can accept or modify them.

It’s like you’re asking why you would want a password manager when you can just type the characters yourself. It saves time if done correctly.

How would an automated drafting mechanism know that your daughter is sick?

I can't imagine what I'm going to do with all the time I save from not laboriously writing out "2PM at shake shack works for me"

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