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Comment by ash_091 | Hacker News Reader

Last week I got an email from a manager about the number of free beverage taps in our office being reduced.

They'd clearly dumped the memo they got about the reduction into some AI with a prompt to write a "fun" announcement. The result was a mess of weird AI positivity and a fun "fact" which was so ludicrous that the manager can't have read it before sending.

I don't mind reading stuff that has been written with assistance from AI, but I definitely think it's concerning that people are apparently willing to send purely AI generated copy without at least reviewing for correctness and tone first.

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Tone policing? I'm fine with it although I too got an email from corporate about an event with the same type of fun energy. My impression changed of the event as it was no longer personal but mechanical.

There's always been some innate ability to recognize effort and experience. I don't know the word for it but looking at a child's or experienced artist drawing you just know if they put in minimal or extra effort.

The funny thing about AI being used to write emails is that, in my opinion, writing emails is a terrible use for it. I've tried having it help me word things in emails because I tend to sound a bit stand-offish in writing, but getting the AI to help with that just tends to make me sound like some kind of pretentious HR manager, and nobody I'm emailing would believe I would write like that.

My company would have spun that like

"We are excited to announce we are supporting our family in their health kick journey. To support them, we have taken the difficult decision to reduce the number of beverages available. We remain fully committed to unlimited delicious tap water, free of charge!"

That's kinda the point. As silly as what you wrote is, it's still a whole level above what ChatGPT can make up. The fact, that it produces human-like text doesn't make it any good, but somewhere there is a manager (and I bet he is not the only one) who just uses it to generate some nonsense announcements and gets paid for his work. Maybe he'll even get a promotion because of how effective he is.

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