“The Nightmare of AI-Powered Gmail Has Arrived”
Are you excited for your co-workers to become way more verbose, turning every tapped-out “Sounds good” into a three-paragraph letter?
And:
Are you looking forward to wondering if that lovely condolence letter from a long-lost friend was entirely generated by software or if he just smashed the “More Heartfelt” button before sending it?
@baldur About that latter point: this is an old objection in new form; I've heard this about mass-produced greeting cards (as opposed to hand-written notes)
@annahavron That is true, but the key difference is that pre-printed greeting cards are obviously mass-produced. The sender is not pretending the sentiment printed on the card is original. ChatGPT output, however, is designed to be indistinguishable from human-generated text.
@fgtech Good point. So, perhaps using ChatGPT for such personal correspondence is more aligned with the ancient practices of plagiarism, or hiring a poetic scribe to write your love letter...
@annahavron Definitely akin to plagiarism, I would say. Even the creators of the system are being cagey about the dataset used to train it. Not all of it has been collected ethically, it seems.
@baldur This tech is determined to evolve, "This meeting could have been an email," into, "This email could have been a DM."
@fgtech @annahavron We might need to watch Her in a new light: the main character makes his living writing personal letters, because regular people can't do it anymore. When you never know if a human wrote that text you're looking at, imagine the value of a (provably) hand-written letter.
@JMaxB Yes; but I could generate text and then copy it with my fountain pen onto my stationery.
Vanderbilt University's adventure with ChatGPT shows that people want heartfelt sentiments to be expressed by humans. But we have PR and advertising firms, which specialize in crafting moving sentiments; would the outrage have been as much if the university's communications department had written up the response? Most likely, they would have a library of clips on hand about responding to all kinds of situations. How is that different? Makes me wonder.
Many people are uncomfortable expressing themselves in writing, and get even more anxious when they want something to be "good" (eloquent or well written or carefully written enough not to provoke a social firestorm). Authorship problems have been with us for a very long time.
Not sure what I think of all this, except that my work break is over.
...And why do I have this sudden desire to watch "Roxanne" again?
cc @fgtech
@annahavron @JMaxb I think if a human is kept in the loop and retains responsibility for the message then I am okay with it. To remain in the clear ethically that human should credit sources used. Technological assistance for that human would be fine if it can cite sources too.
@gregmoore I am totally in favor of eliminating useless meetings! Technology that can identify and extract the meaningful heart of a message and summarize it simply cannot exist if even the humans can’t agree on what that is. Sometimes we must discuss things to figure them out.
@fgtech Authorship as ownership. I like it. Related: one of the hardest writing habits for me to get rid after leaving academia was use of the passive voice.