I can appreciate LLMs for some use cases, but writing emails for the user is the one that really baffles me.

It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood, but the amount of native speakers using this is so strange to me. How does this help you? If you can write to the LLM telling it what kind of email to write, you might as well just write the email.

The most frustrating thing to me is to receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI that filled in the email with vapid and useless talking points, like "Let me know if you need any other blah blah blah; While there is clearly a need for system improvement, we are working hard to address the underlying and fundamental issue; This is a lesson that it's not just a feature, it's a critical path for our users, etc."

My theory is that people are fundamentally averse to the thought and effort it takes to write a good quality email. Then there’s probably some underlying belief that more volume shows more effort, which people will perceive positively. And finally, there's the worry that if you write the email yourself, you might make some embarrassing wording, grammar, or spelling mistake.

It’s the protocol of the brave new world, you and the recipient need a single sentence to communicate but the culture dictates using certain language and politeness + personal flavor so your AI helps you write culturally appropriate fluff and the person who receives it is using their AI to get rid if the fluff so you are both optimized for productivity through stripping the culture away making your interactions faceless and yourself fungible.

You can imagine this spread into dating as well, so you just have sex efficiently to optimize the breeding and hedonism.

At some point the protocol of expanding and then compacting with AI will also be removed to optimize the unneeded inference and people will again talk to each other but using the caveman language, stripped away from centuries of culture.

Ronny Chieng's speech at Harvard's Class Day that went viral put it well, something along the lines of "AI can write emails and summarize threads for you. You know who else can do that? Me."

It's insecurity. They worry they might be saying something dumb and the LLM gives them assurance that it sounds "better" and "more professional."

It is no surprise to me at all that some people reach to bots for help with writing email.

I've seen some very incomprehensibly-written communication in my time, including from people who speak English as a first language.

The most frustrating group of consistent offenders I've seen was comprised of folks who absolutely should know better: School teachers.

I don't use gmail but often get an LLM to write certain emails. The benefit is that it can pull in context and typically one-shot the email without me prompting it at all.

For example, a tenant emails me about some issue relating to a specific property. It can go through my leases, find the right one, check other emails to see I ordered a new appliance to that specific address, track shipping/install, all that, then reply appropriately.

Youtube implemented the same sort of thing for channels. If you have a youtube channel and someone comments on one of your videos, there is an AI-generated "reply" that you can click to avoid having to actually think about interacting with commenters on your videos.

The weird thing is, if I commented on a channel and they sent me an AI-generated reply, I'd just hate them forever.

> It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood

If someone reading does this, please, do not. Imperfect English is a lot more pleasant to read than AI slop. It will not sound better, it will sound worse.

Normies love this shit because it makes them fit in the crowd effortlessly. Same reason why corporate slop was a thing even before AI.

Personally, when I message people I respect I either don't use AI or ask it "please fix typos only", but if it's someone I don't give a fuck about, then AI-generated slop it is, because assuming that the recipient is a random person, AI-generated slop has the highest chance of actually getting shit done.

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If i write a bad email because i'm frustrated to some company or whatever and want them to change their behavour, i think a llm can write an email, which triggers these people a lot more than my 'polite' way of convincing others.