AIBU to wish people would stop writing professional emails with Chat GPT?

[4pmfireworks]

One of my managers writes absolutely everything with Chat GPT and as a result, all her emails are oddly formal and often get people's backs up. The tone is all wrong. I don't think she realises how badly she is coming across - and most of the team don't realise that the reason her communication is so lacking warmth and human touch is because she's telling AI what she wants to say.

She even once sent an email to me to let me know that "Marie Jones (your team leader) will advise you on this matter separately." Oh, THAT Marie Jones?! My team leader?! The one who I share an office with?! Thank God you included her surname and clarified her role or I would not have had a clue which Marie (the only one who works with us) you were talking about.

I've just had a general class update from my child's teacher that has been written with Chat GPT - I guess it saves time and I don't really blame him, but I do find it cringy. Once you spot it, it's so obvious. I would be embarrassed to send it.

I should add that I'm not always entirely sure why it's obviously written by AI. The adjectives are a bit off I think. And the sentence structure is recognisably formulaic and always rather longer than a human tends to write.

If you do this at work, you should know that some of the recipients know exactly what you're doing, and it doesn't look great.

Detest AI and it is so easy to spot.

Ebay listings use it now, and it puts me off buying from those sellers.

I want to read what someone really thinks of their antique object, with it honestly described, not some AI garbage.

Al voices on you tube narrations are ghastly, too.

I put in a pic of my dog's head into an AI generator, and it came out like this.... What the heck? Very bizarre.

Bingo - dull AND soulless. If I spot something written by AI, I leave the website. It has its place, sure, but I can't trust how accurate it is, and I honestly don't want to read something written by a computer. Where's the soul and personal take on a subject? It's not there, and I doubt it ever will be.

Recruiters are recruiting people though, and not just a bunch of tech skills.

It’s by definition not the future, as it never generates anything new, just regurgitates what has already been written.

Back to op on tone, an oddly formal and stiff tone is often used when people are trying to ‘manage’ and think they have to be more formal but don’t quite have enough grasp of nuance of vocabulary and register. I edit academic essays and they often suffer the same issue.

register and tone is HARD when you’re stepping out of your comfortable norm. It takes. A lot of practice to effectively code switch this way

And yet I have heard that some companies use AI to screen all the applications and that the computer rejects the original ones!

I'm glad to hear you're trying to find applicants who have actually made an effort.

I'm skeptical of the 'it saves time'-argument. For those who use it a lot: Does it mean you get to leave the office early every day? Or does your working day just fill up with more tasks? Because that has been the result of many time saving technologies: we just end up doing more. In the first instance it might feel like saving time, but slowly expectations creep up: We don't need four people to work on this report anymore, Jayne can do it by herself. Or instead of writing one report a month, you now get asked to write three. Which of course is beneficial from an employer's perspective, but surely for the individual worker it makes little difference?

I don't use it and agree it's so 'robotic'.

I was helping my nephew with application questions and had to rewrite everything the darn thing spat out. It was so obviously not written by a human being.

Just tell your colleague to put a :) at the end of every sentence
:)

I don't need to to be 100% accurate as I'm teaching 9 year olds writing skills mostly.

why don’t you need it to be accurate?! Because kids don’t care? Because you’re weirdly divorcing content from skills? There are definitely kids who will absorb that as fact, and others who will absorb that accuracy doesn’t matter and shouldn’t we be reinforcing critical thinking and awareness of media unreliability and fake news instead of teaching them to write it. What skills are you teaching them that needs inaccurate facts?

if you’re teaching sentence structure use something else - accurate or genuine fiction.
if you’re teaching newspaper use actual newspapers - there are some designed specifically for kids you could use.

honestly as a teacher this is a terrible take

AI is in a constant state of evolution and is enhancing all the time. If workplaces aren’t using it, they will be left behind.

I work in the City and we are being pushed to use it. Different AI for different tasks as they all have strengths and weaknesses. You need to know what you are doing, know that it can hallucinate answers, ask for the right tone, tune the output. But once you know what you’re doing, then the efficiencies can be huge.

We often have to read and digest a huge amount of research papers, Claude AI can read these for you and make it in to a podcast. Some people are better at listening for learning so being able to listen to a podcast rather than spending more time reading can only be beneficial. That AI isn’t pulling in external sources either, it’s only taken from what you have input.

I get this too. Even on here I have been accused of being AI because of a combination of professional writing experience and neurodivergence.

Personally I like emails that tell me exactly what is needed and who exactly is involved. I know the person sending it generally couldn't give two shits about my weekend or how the email finds me.

I’m a lecturer and would say between 30-75% of the assignments I mark use AI depending on the demographics of the cohort. I can spot it but can’t prove it. The quality used to be so bad I would just fail the work, but if used well it has improved so much that I’m no longer justified in doing this. We are constantly trying to find new ways of AI proofing assignments but AI improves all the time. One of the reasons I no longer enjoy my job.

I think it works for someone that can already write. You can plug a draft in and it can spruce it up a bit. BUT you need to be able to write in order to edit it afterwards.
People that don’t have that skill can’t give it the edit it needs.

This is such a poor method of research! Looking for the articles and books you need is a vital part of the process- you'll never find that fascinating new direction if you skip the (iterative) search stage. And what a waste of time if Chat generates imaginary articles!
(Not intended as a dig at your DD)

ChatGP has been useful in condensing down writing for a correct word count. And I find Grammarly useful too.

As someone who cuts down word counts and fixes grammar for a living, I would warn against relying on AI to do this. Editing text is a sensitive job. It's very easy to screw up and mangle the original meaning, or ruin the flow ... or scrap a line that, while not conveying much information, is essential for getting across the import of information already conveyed.

Sometimes I just don't have headspace to write long pieces from scratch. Having a suggested template based on a few inputs defo saves time (with a lot of editing).

Definite agree. We've had some teachers using it for reports and whilst writing reports is a time drain it's hugely disrespectful towards the students. And hugely obvious.

There was a teacher on here recently who said she used AI to mark her students' work. Someone else pointed out that the students were probably using AI to write it. Maybe we can leave the bots to it while we all go off to the pub ...

I really struggle to write e mails with a certain tone, so I use it to support me in writing them, AI words it then then I spent time editing the hell out of it. It REALLY helps me get over the hill so to speak.

That's shocking.

I think ChatGPT is very useful.

Agree. I have many students that use AI. The ones that use fake references or submit a 1000-word piece of written work without a single reference are easy. These are reported to our university's disciplinary committee. But an essay that is just written in a generic way and lacks specific examples, but does include (real) references? Students have been writing assignments like that for much longer than ChatGPT has been around. The difference is that usually their writing style also used to be quite poor, whereas I find ChatGPT produces output that is often poor in content but quite well-structured.

AI has a lot of uses, but writing isn’t one of them.

Yes I think this might be the case.

I have a colleague with a brilliant, logical, technical and creative mind but his SPAG is pretty terrible. One of my roles is to write and edit reports and web articles for a professional but much less technical audience.

I’m currently trying to persuade him gently to cut out ChatGPT and give his raw material to me to edit directly because it seems to be taking his terse, accurate, factual but ungrammatical words and turning them into drivel that I then have to reverse-engineer. It makes me quite sad.

We all went on a mandatory course on how to use AI like Chat CPT at work (a lot of it was warnings not to use it for anything confidential).

The very invested in AI external trainer got quite cross when we worked out the funniest thing is it treats any request, no matter how ridiculous, seriously and will solomnly fulfil them with an earnest and rather elaborate formality.

It is great at Vogon poetry.