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Comment by vdnkh | Hacker News Reader

This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is

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Who cares? If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package.

Its all lip service - either AI generated or hand written.

> If you're getting laid off, the only thing that really matters is the severance package.

I don't think this is true. Humans typically prefer "thanks for the hard work, here's your severance" to "you suck, here's your severance, loser."

Humans like being treated with respect, and words are a big part of that. Money is nice, but it's not the only thing we care about.

It's the only thing crypto folks care about, so idk, I think it's fitting.

The difference between the "thanks" email and the "loser" email is that the second one is intentionally disrespectful.

I'm not convinced a polite but AI-written email hits the same note. At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful, which isn't a direct challenge. Your boss doesn't care enough to write an email by hand, but also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.

So it isn't disrespectful, and neither is it respectful. A perfect nothing, not a thought or care involved. Like a 1-click eCard mailer.

Genuine question. Let's say you are bad with words.

If you ask AI to generate hundred different paragraphs and choose the one which best conveys what you actually feel and want to communicate.

Is it is still a perfect nothing?

> Is it is still a perfect nothing?

You do get how that's worse, right? The person rather spends their time arguing with the clanker than thinking about the person and putting those thought into words, however unstructured they are.

Yeah, but communication is a two-way street. It might not matter to me that my words are unstructured, but it will to the person I'm writing to if they can't make head nor tail of what I'm saying, or worse, misunderstand it as being insulting when it isn't.

There is a whole industry built around [mis-]conception that people will take less offense on the content if it was presented differently. The predictable result is that it is actually rewriting content, not the presentation or tone. No amount of linkedinese corporate fluffery will wash off the core message that people are getting laid off unless you outright hide the message under ambiguity of double-speak like "slimming down operations", which can mean multiple things.

So essentially you have three choices:

1. Spend time writing (or have written by a copywriter) in corporate fluff dialect, where the actual message is still understandable by all parties. At the cost of appearing tone deaf.

2. Spend time reiterating with a bot that speaks some undefined sub-dialect of LLMinese where the reception of the message is unknown. At the cost of appearing even more tone deaf and insulting than a corporate cog.

3. Spend time restructuring message in genuine voice. At the cost of maybe being heard more harshly than intended.

I fail to see how option 2 can be perceived as anything but the worst, unless you assume that the target audience does not distinguish LLMinese from actual speech.

Totally agree. I don't understand why people are averse to working on their communication "soft" skills compared to other "hard" skills. People who find it hard to express themselves have my sympathy but at the same time I'm flabbergasted how they function in a team or in the workplace. Not to mention people for whom English is not the native language treating LLMs like the Star Trek universal communicator instead of helping with language acquisition.

And yeah, I know my tone is harsh and appears to lack empathy and I have only my writing skills to blame and a lack of time. That said I won't be the one to throw it in a LLM for "refinement" otherwise how would I improve? I'm not sure LLMs are to communication as are forklifts to lifting and moving stuff.

As a side note, the general advice regarding code review in my experience was not to take it personally and it's kinda funny to me for reasons I can't pin point how people (like me) have started giving unsolicited advice or criticism in regard to writing when in actuality both (code and writing) reflect personally on the human on the other side of the screen.

Anyway, I pretty much went off on my own tangent here with an apparent lack of empathy to boot but if we end up disregarding such fundamental human skills then what's to stop us from becoming dunces in a few generations? Sure, I'll add another abstraction layer even if it has a lot in common with reading tea leaves because it's not like I manually flip switches to input a program but I'll try my best to keep my individuality where it matters to me, specifically when it comes to expressing myself.

Thank you for coming to my TED rant.

You are contradicting yourself: either presentation is not important so LLM use does not matter (as long as core message is still there), or it is important and and LLM can change how the message is received (by improving presentation or making it worse).

I don't see a contradiction. What they are saying is that no amount of non-ambiguous presentation can make poor content acceptable. They never said the presentation was meaningless.

Example: A friend has died and consolation is given. No amount of consolation makes the death a good thing for you, but there is still a difference in how that consolation is presented to you.

Why are you a CEO if you are bad with words. If a CEO's work can be reduced to picking the best option from AI generated text why do they make so much money, and why would anyone chose to invest in a company that could be led by anyone picking from a list of AI responses.

The problem with AI is that it tells you to say things you don't think, and can't tell you to say things which are original to you. Some things you will only say because they were presented to you by the bot. Others you won't say because they only exist in your head.

If you are bad enough with words that you can't write an authentic message, you are also bad enough with words that you won't understand the options with enough nuance to know what you are saying. The bot will put words in your mouth that aren't true.

It is generally better to write poorly and from the heart than to outsource your heart to a really big algorithm. What you accidentally say from the heart will still echo your thoughts, while the AI will not. ChatGPT can't suddenly remember the time when you and your wife went to the beach together and saw a penguin, and she was worried it wouldn't be able to reach the ocean, and then it was totally fine and she got embarrassed, but you felt really in love with her because she cared so much.

It's further north of nothing.

It's a little less than if you got up and stood in the convenience store to pick 1 of 12 "Get Well!" cards. That's a few meaningful steps up (literally) from the 1-click eCard. The output will be a bit better for it, but more importantly, it shows more that interaction mattered for you.

The effort is meaningfully part of the output. I think many would still prefer if you scratched a couple non-perfect words yourself. I know I would. Those words are You, and if you're in a place to send me a card, what matters is that you showed up and offered Your words. The language and the card are transfer media.

In the same way....... you could go the opposite extra mile to make a very elaborate "you suck, here's your severance, loser!" message that would tip towards disrespectful :p

> At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful

There is ZERO CHANCE they have used ai unintentionally

> also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.

By actively using ai they are stating that you are so much beyond them that even a personal "eff you" is not worth the time. One would have to actively try and poke some personally hurtful areas to come off more insulting than use of ai.

"Unintentional" was perhaps the wrong word.

There's a difference between your boss not caring about you (does any boss really care?) and your boss actively disliking you enough to call you a loser when they expect to gain nothing from it.

In the former case, disrespect is a side effect of laziness, while in the latter it is the whole point.

My point is that presence of LLMisms is in itself a form of disrespect

My point is that it's disrespect of the same kind as your boss forgetting your name when you've been working for them for ten years, not as being called a loser.

I don't understand — I use AI to write email particularly _because_ I care about the recipient, and am confident the resulting email will more eloquently and accurately express my feelings. I'll also often edit it afterwards to ensure it's in my voice. Regardless, I don't think it's fair to presume that my boss doesn't case because an LLM generated the email.

^ This was written 100% by hand. Let's have Claude proofread it and make any suggestions:

I'd argue the opposite — I reach for AI because I care about the recipient. It helps me express my thoughts more precisely and eloquently than I might off the cuff, and I'll often edit the result to make sure it sounds like me.

Presuming that an LLM-assisted email signals indifference seems like a category error. The care is in what you're trying to communicate, not which tool you used to get there. -- https://claude.ai/share/3d3d1a78-381c-4fcf-9354-69b10f2d6f4a

But what if was "Thanks for the hard work, here's your legal minimum severance" vs "You suck, here's a lavish severance so you don't ever come back"?

Money IS the ultimate respect. Talk is cheap.

The only talk that has real value is "Hey, hire this guy - he's excellent and did an incredible job!"

Words are fake, money is real.

In Fire & Blood, it is said "words are wind, but wind can fan a fire," so be polite folks.

Noted. Handing bro a cool $20 instead when he asks me to dial 911

Quaint.

Yeah but in American corporate culture workers are entirely disposable.

Which ofcourse leads workers to treat their employers as disposable.

If the main guy's email is written by AI, at this point we're actually in an invasion of the body snatchers scenario.

Who actually is required?

.. fundamentally, it's only the person collecting payment.

There are other audiences, too.

One group are the ones who are staying. They lose teammates, they have to restructure work and fear whether there will be another round soon, which may hit them.

And then there are customers, investors, ... who need to be assured they are not dealing with a failing company.

>Who cares?

People with dignity.

> To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.

For sure this part screams LLM

Reminds me grok

"We’re not building Skynet, we’re cutting costs and putting the survivors on prompt duty"

Anything in that format gives that AI feel

+1 and the irony of this CEO-Idiot calling LLMs "intelligence" and putting people, the stupidest of which are 1000x orders of magnitude more intelligent than an LLM, in the second spot "aligning it", i.e. fixing the AI slop.

> rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it

Wow. That’s my cue to never use Coinbase again.

I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.

Yep, it's 25+ years of corporate communications.

This is just good writing, not a 100% proof of AI being used.

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