I always wonder, if I’m like experiencing extreme privilege or something, in that I’m able to write words to express what I want to say.
Like, I don’t know, I’ve got a colleague who’s probably got dyslexia and also sometimes struggles with how to word things in English. I can understand that he finds it useful for that.
But personally, I always think that if I would’ve wanted it to be written differently, I would’ve written it differently. I do not want a machine to put words into my mouth, because they will inevitably be different from what I wanted to say.
at work we are recommended to put things through AI to sound more ⚡️E X E C U T I V E ⚡️🔥🔥🔥🤙
so you do something like, “Got new images from design” and it’ll rephrase to “Aligned on tactical operations with communications dept and successfully launched adoption of new collateral”
It’s been eye-opening to see how much “leadership” is just “heavily reword simple things into complicated language to make them sound more impressive”
I learned this reading Dilbert years ago, no AI needed heh
It’s been eye-opening to see how much “leadership” is just “heavily reword simple things into complicated language to make them sound more impressive”
I’ve been thinking this for years. After I manage to descramble management’s latest directives into something comprehensible I like to break it down in team meetings so we can all make fun of it together.
We have an AI tool that is apparently supposed to improve the tone of voice and shorten messages. It turns my short sentence into a paragraph with a bunch of pointless extra words.
Did you also struggle to get up to the word/paragraph/page count on essays in school?
Depends on what the essay was about, something boring? Yes. Something interesting? No.
You left out “yet vague and unaccountable.”
Oh man, I think I’d turn violent, if I was asked to do that. I need to communicate to convey information, not obfuscate it in absolute wankery.
Have it quote you?
I find it useful for when I have to respond to a communication and all I want to say is invective and a curse-laden rant about what a fucking poorly thought out terminal prolapse of an idea that particular thing would be, and I can ask it to reword my arguments in a professional manner that won’t get me either fired or committed to supervisory care.
I am one of those people that prior to AI I used the thesaurus for absolutely everything and reworded things a million times myself. Words just slip my mind often and I can never get my intent quite down the first time. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a non-native speaker or I just overthink things.
It does help for that sometimes, but honestly the stuff it writes just sounds so AI I end up changing it again to sound more like myself anyway. I only really use it for work to cut down on the 3 hours it would’ve taken me to write an email.
It’s an immense privilege that in first world countries all people theoretically have the right to obtain. That’s one of the purposes of general education, but through a lot of failures between schools, parents, students, and society at large it’s become less universal than it should be.
“Why do I have to keep writing pointless essays about stupid books?” Because you need to be able to interpret a text and communicate clearly in the written word, and these are both harder than it seems. Furthermore, it’s often the students who haven’t gotten it yet that complain the most. I know I did. I wasn’t just frustrated with the books I didn’t like or the long hours writing, I was frustrated with how I struggled to really understand how to write naturally and effectively.
And I should add, I’m both (mildly) dyslexic and dyscalcic. I write fairly well if I do say so myself, and I’m an engineer, so these aren’t insurmountable challenges
Outlook always suggests I delete and add words because the way I wrote things is “incorrect”, but their suggestions are, to my mind, objectively worse and communicate my thoughts poorly. Over time Microsoft is gaslighting me to think my grammar is terrible.
Maybe dyslexia can cause that (dunno, I’m not a psych or dyslexic), but anecdotally my dyslexic teacher never seems to have problems wording or explaining things more than any other person. It’s just really obvious when she’s reading aloud from something and starts tripping and mixing up words, and her handouts have weird typos and autocorrect issues that she didn’t see. But she is extremely vocally opinionated on some high level topics, haha.
But I hear the sentiment you’re saying, for people that genuinely do struggle to express the sentiment they’re wanting to convey, I’m sure it’s helpful. I guess the question is, are (general) you doing it because you can’t do it yourself or because you want instant gratification? The process of articulating your thoughts is an important part of understanding them more thoroughly, and that ability will atrophy just due to how brains work if you stop doing it.
Hell, there’s even middle ground here. Set an amount of time to spend on it and really, genuinely try to write it. Even if it’s nothing but bullet point ideas. Then after spending that time struggling, if it’s not usable (just usable! Not perfect!) then send it through the AI, if (general) you must.
Ah yeah, sorry, the dyslexia part is a separate issue to formulating sentences. So, he’ll write a sentence and then often have mistyped words + might separately have formulation issues. Running it through an LLM can fix both of those, so it’s kind of worth doubly for him to do.
The process of articulating your thoughts is an important part of understanding them more thoroughly
Yeah, I recently told that same colleague that it took me hours to formulate a few short sentences on our webpage to describe a software that we’re building. And then he hit me again with him finding AI helpful for that.
I had to get back to him on that a few days later, because it wasn’t the putting-into-concrete-words part that took me so long. It was the what-the-fuck-do-i-even-want-to-say-here part. We’d been building this software for three years and no one had sat down to properly break down what it is that the software is able to do and in which situations it is useful.
What I described as “formulating” was really:
- brainstorming
- clustering ideas into concrete concepts
- eliminating imprecision in my own understanding of the problem domain and our solution (at one point, I even genuinely had to open up our source code to remind myself how our software works)
- and well, kind of just keeping notes as I go…?
That’s the thing, the actual putting-into-concrete-words part always just feels like I’m keeping track of my current understanding. If I had to do it all in my head, so that I can outsource the putting-into-concrete-words to a machine, it would certainly not make it faster, but rather make this thought process impossible for me.
I can never write what I intend to say. I’m never really sure of my intent when I sit down to write so that probably has a lot to do with it. I also don’t want a machine to write it for me.
there is something in between my brain and my mouth that stops words from reaching my mouth occasionally (i think it’s called aphasia) and if you’re patient and give me a few minutes i can write a sentence that sounds professional and has all the right words. If i gotta dash of fifty of them in a minute i’m going to sound like an inebriated clown who is speaking their third language. some might be poetic, some might be funny, but they’re going to be all over the place as i try to remember what that thing that makes the hard crunchy cold drink stuff tasty drink fuck whats it ICE YES FINALLY SHUT UP
we play the hand we’re glorped
I’m with you. I wouldn’t appreciate someone standing over my shoulder trying to guess every word I’m about to write, so why would I tolerate that from a word processor? Maybe we are in the minority, but I take care to pick words and phrases that fit what I want to convey. Having a machine assume it can know what’s in my mind better than I do is nonsense.
There are at least a dozen countries around the world where less than half of residents would be able to read your post no matter what language it was translated into. Which is to say basic literacy, [which should be] a human right, is apparently a privilege in today’s world.
Then what you’re talking about goes beyond that to a strong command of the language—definitely an awesome power :) we are lucky to be able to do this. (usually, for me, and there’s usually some technological/social bridge for exceptions)
all the data i am finding seems to report north korea at 100% literacy. i’m no propagandist, but i know propaganda when i see it.
What if Clippy cost the GDP of Argentina?
Would you like me to take what you’ve written and suck the humanity out of it?
Surely this reply to your masterful comment was written by a moist human! Bleep bloop.
Hmmm, moist human.
someone should tell her about libreoffice
I’ve tried but Emma Thompson refuses my calls and never responds to my emails.
You might have better luck going through here agent
I’m trying but going from the ribbon interface I’ve been using since 2006 to the pre-ribbon interface feels like a time warp, in a bad way.
I’m old… i remember when everyone absolutely abhorred the ribbon interface.
Still hate it here!
Yeah, the OSS Office apps are so ugly and painful to use after using MS Office for over a decade. Really reminds me about how much I hated using MS Office before the redesigned UI.
(Really hoping to trigger Cunningham’s Law on this one)
You want to select the Tabbed interface here: https://books.libreoffice.org/en/WG252/WG2521-UserInterfaceVariants.html#toc6
Sweet. Anyone recently install this for the first time?:
I’d think the installer could ask if the user is most familiar with Microsoft products or whatever, then confirm which interface will be defaulted as a result.
Would have to create an issue or something for this eh
I haven’t installed it recently, but I swear a few months ago or so it came up with a selection screen for which UI I wanted. I can’t remember which I picked rn, I just know I think I switched recently because i couldn’t find the hanging indent to save my life, and I was writing a paper…
Not in the Settings for some reason.
Thank you, that’s very helpful.
It’s sorta typical of the OSS community. Engineers aren’t designers and it would seem that UI designers are either not as interested in OSS as engineering types or they’re squeezed out by curmudgeonly engineers.
that’s so funny to hear, all I’ve been hearing from linux users for the last forever is how much they hate the ribbon!
Ephere below mentioned you can change it to a tabbed interface here: https://books.libreoffice.org/en/WG252/WG2521-UserInterfaceVariants.html#toc6
It’s resistance to change. When it was new, people hated it. Now when it’s old, it’s hard going back. If you never changed, it’s new and bad.
OSS isn’t known for its revolutionary user interface experiences.
Stephen Fry would have already tried.
Clippy 2.0
That’s an insult to Clippy. At least Clippy tried to be useful. These LLMs don’t even try.
Not old enough to actually havd any experience with clippy (I think the earliest Windows UI I ever touched was XP, but that was made before i was born lol), but at least Clippy was local and didn’t steal your data right? Even if he was useless he could be turned off and didn’t stalk you.
Instead people installed BonziBuddy, which did all the stealing and stalking.
Yes, Clippy existed at a time where your computer wasn’t expected to be connected to the internet 24/7.
Which is the only reason why Clippy didn’t steal your data. If it could have, it would have.
Nah. In the 1990s personal data wasn’t valuable to Microsoft because they weren’t selling advertising at the time.
Clippy was there only to sell more copies of office.
Don’t use word then, it’s so shit.
“You’re fired.”
Did you mean: your privileged shareholder contributionary role has been made redundant
What does Word do that can’t be done with a dull pencil and a cocktail napkin? 🤷♂️
Ah, Down Cemetery Road - maybe you saw Slow Horses from the same author’s mind?
Both mentioned in this Mirror article (known for top journalism, OK maybe not but entertainment pieces could be all right)
Funny thing. I loved both shows, and really dislike the original writer.
I find him overly snarky; his style is like a bad Douglas Adams pastiche.
His plots aren’t worth the slog; thank goodness for TV adaptations.
Just bring it round to Stephen Fry’s house and he’ll rewrite it for you.
Sauce?
A recent episode of Colbert’s Late Show; I remember seeing this segment, should be on the YouTube page.
