Interesting. I have found the opposite to be true. I think AI, so far, is mostly an excuse for people to hide a lack of intentionality behind efficiency.
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iOS 18: Apple Mail App May Help You Compose and Reply to Your Emails
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And I still find it offensive to receive a personal email that’s authored by AI, not the person it purports to be from.
No, I’m not “just here to trash everything” and since you insulted me personally I don’t think I’ll be giving you any examples at all.
Yes you did:
While it's not out yet and no one publicly have full picture of it.
Back in the earlier days of e-mail, we'd complain about copy-and-paste e-mails from the big bin. Before that, it was form letters. This has been happening for a century.
Dear [cust_name]....blah blah blah
Mailers are presumed to be from a company. They’re obviously boilerplate and impersonal. The issue in this instance is that it’s for personal email. Maybe people won’t end up sending personal emails to their friends that they didn’t actually write themselves, but chances are they will. In my opinion that’s problematic for pretty obvious reasons.
Now, having read my post above, imagine that I didn’t actually write any of it but allowed an AI to do it for me. That would color your impression of my post (and me), especially if you didn’t find out it was authored by AI until you’d interacted with “me” for a while.
I get where you're coming from, but AI-assisted emails are tools to help us communicate more effectively. Just like spellcheck or grammarly. As long as the core ideas and intent are mine, using AI doesn't take away from the authenticity of my message. It's all about making communication clearer and more effective.
Doesn't change the fact that they're useful tools, even more so when someone can't articulate themselves as effectively as they'd like (or, to use your analogy, can't walk).
Oh, given you have never seen an email I have written, I suppose this is your own personal experience? I'm very sorry to hear that you have this problem.
Whilst I, like you (it would appear) am not keen on AI writing replies, thankfully I have absolutely no need of it. I think if you give it time and practise your English sufficiently you too may find that you can send replies to emails without assistance in the future. Don't give up. It's really not that hard, I promise. You should be Good in NotALongTime.
As I was mentioning previously, it will probably make their e-mails look more intelligent, which will be a clue to how much help they got.
People have become lazy with English in the last couple of generations. They don't use the correct words and they barely write complete sentences. A group of friends will probably all be using AI help or none of them at all.
I spent plenty of time with a numeric keypad trying to send SMS to someone but some people never learned better than that. I keep hoping that humanity will do better, but the percentage who are willing to work hard seems to decrease weekly. I want to be found incorrect because humanity should be better.
Exactly, I feel like AI is just going to make those who lack wanting to learn how to do things well even lazier. And they won't understand why they don't stand out in any meaningful way in their corporate life and are just one of a nameless group who all sound the same.
If you're paying attention and learning from those aids, you won't need them after a while. It's like the automatic driver assistance in vehicles. You can use it for a short while, but if you're not paying attention, you might end up in a wreck.
There’s no better investment than education. Simple as that.
Exactly. I’ve never had a problem with English grammar but I was a very poor speller until I learned to type. It was MS spellcheck that did it. But I was done with it after a couple months. That was years ago. Now I actively turn off Apple’s auto-correct because it slows me down and has some absolutely CRAZY ideas about what it thinks I’m writing.
Interesting! My wife and I are convinced that spelling is borderline genetic! I have always spelled well. Her? Not so much. At least she used to not be very good at spelling, but thanks for MS spellcheck on Windows 98 on, she is vastly improved!
Now if you don't mind, I am going to turn off Mac spellcheck because I completely agree with you on the craziness. Thanks for the reminder.
Yeah, thanks for the reminder. I really need to turn off Apple’s auto-cap, auto-correction, and predictive text in iPadOS and iOS. I spend WAY too much time beating them into submission. I don’t mind a basic spell check so much since typos do happen, and at least for me, they are more frequent on a touch screen keyboard than a physical one.
Yeah, I was thinking about something along this lines.
Like, I’ve always been proud of having good writing skills, and that could’ve been a quality that could’ve made me stand out among other people. Now that everyone will have this good quality writing skills… I can no longer use that to differentiate myself from others.
I think you underestimate the "uncanny valley" nature of AI writing. Our brains specifically try to pick up on patterns. As more and more people use AI to be lazy and do the writing, it looks retrospectively and it will sound the same to all the other users using it for that purpose.
It will be especially obvious in emails where short and sweet is what people want anyway. Not short and sweet, but instead looooooots of words that don't really say anything? Definitely AI.
AI can write "short and sweet" for you too.
That's just some narrow view of certain default AI-generated styles of it that you have seen or were able to recognize. It can generate whatever you want with proper prefeeding and prompting it already and it will only get better.
You’re safe. AI won’t make people into good writers. Instead it’ll pump out boring, unimaginative and generic sentences that won’t impress anyone.
At whose expense? Who’s writing are you going to train it on? Are they getting paid? And if you’re training it on your own writing, why do you even need it? A machine that mimics your writing seems like the definition of useless.
Grammar and spell check are all that’s required. An AI writing personal emails is creepy and wrong.