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Tangentially I also hate if someone answers with a voice message. I can understand that there are situations where you just can't type out the answer and those
by blensor 28d ago
Tangentially I also hate if someone answers with a voice message.
I can understand that there are situations where you just can't type out the answer and those exceptions are of course fine, but if you post a voice message or god forbid a video message in a group chat you are forcing everyone to take the time and sit through it.
- mapontosevenths 28d agoLiteracy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI. To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.
- oldmanhorton 28d agoI think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either
- mapontosevenths 28d agoIt's hard to talk about it in a very general way without being wrong a significant percentage of the time. I suspect we're both right, just on different occasions.
- ragequittah 28d agoI always wonder why people generalize AI writing like this. If it's giving you responses like this that you don't like it's as simple as prompting it to give more succinct answers that aren't full of jargon and abstract nouns. I have chatgpt set to 'Efficient (concise and plain)' in the settings which works well to prevent this. And if efficient isn't enough some brief custom instructions will do wonders.
- abustamam 28d agoBecause this is a thread about other people's usage of AI, so how I/you personally use it is irrelevant because we still have to deal with everyone else pasting AI, in which case it is generally long and wordy.
- deleted 28d ago[deleted]
- NateEag 28d agoI am literate and hyperlexic - I read ~500 words a minute, and have read thousands of books for fun. I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons, but one of them is the way it bastardizes and ruins the written word. It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do. The signal-to-noise ratio in genAI writing is just wretched. Yes, I can read the thousand-word ball of muck you pasted from Claude in about thirty seconds, but it could have been one second had you used your mind instead of committing a worthless act that cost me time and gained both of us nothing.
- mapontosevenths 28d ago> It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do. Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above. > I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good: a) Always find them to be bad b) Are always bad at using them
- NateEag 27d ago> Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above. I use Claude every day, by corporate mandate, generally with Opus 4.8 or 5, but sometimes Sonnet 5 (per corporate demand to both use LLMs heavily and simultaneously keep the bills within a budget). I hate doing it, but I get results my coworkers, PMs, and end users are happy with. > Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good... I admit regularly that LLMs do amazing things. They're astonishingly good at breaking security, for instance. That doesn't mean I like them. And no, they really are not good at writing. When you feel the impulse to be defensive, that's often a sign that asking questions will be more worthwhile than leaping into the defensive posture.
- mapontosevenths 27d agoClaude might be the problem here. It really is bad at writing and ticks all the boxes you mentioned. It's much better at code. I don't mean to be defensive, just to point out that most of the statements you made are provably and obviously untrue... And given that you admit bias that's the most likely explanation. I hadn't considered that you have experience, but only with one that is legitimately bad at this particular thing because someone forced it onto you. Fair enough. We don't all have to like the same things.
- AnimalMuppet 28d agoOK, but are you hiring semi-literate people to do jobs that involve writing at your company?
- mapontosevenths 28d agoEveryone is. They just don't always know that.
- jazzyjackson 28d agoChatGPT can talk voice to voice to I don’t really get where you’re coming from. People are just afraid of billionaires becoming trillionaires and not having food and shelter
- jeltz 28d agoIn my experience it is the semi literate people who love generative AI the most. The people who struggled to form sentenced and hated reading.
- prepend 28d agoI think some people suck (myself included) at writing and are amazed that they can finally generate text (fortunately not myself). So their output from an llm has the halo/ikea/endowment effect and they want to show off what they “wrote.” Writing is actually super easy. Editing and writing well is the hard part. It’s like co-workers who wrote a terrible book being excited just because they wrote a book.
- markovs_gun 28d agoIn my experience it is the semi-literate who are most impressed by AI writing and the ones who use it the most to write for them.
- fn-mote 28d agoFortunately, if they send it as a text message or voicemail, I get automatic transcription. Too bad that’s not more universal.
- miroljub 28d agoIn WhatsApp?
- biztos 28d agoThe WhatsApp voice message is very common in Spain. I always find it jarring when I'm there, mostly because I'm not used to it, but also because it seems to defeat the purpose of the messaging app: I can't listen to your voice message on the bus, for instance. It's so normalized there that I wonder whether this is a particularly Spanish habit. Maybe there are a bunch of countries where people routinely leave each other voice recordings on WhatsApp/Messenger/etc, and I just haven't been to them yet.
- dummydummy1234 28d agoWas just in south America, everyone uses it.
- winstonp 28d agoIt's a habit in specific countries, China is one in my experience.
- prepend 28d agoIt’s funny to me how I judge some cultural aspects as being worse. Of course it’s my own cultural bias, but I think the following things are “bad” for cultures to do: 1) long voice memos over succinctly typed notes 2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc 3) habitually late or not on time
- account42 27d ago> 2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc Also even queueing can have different norms. Here people rush to a newly opened supermarket checkout like their life depended on it. I feel that should be a lot less sociably acceptable than it is, especially for those with overfilled carts that will add huge delays for anyone behind them.
- kspacewalk2 28d agoMaybe it's a cultural thing in the Spanish speaking world? Had the same experience in Colombia.
- wreath 28d agoSame here. I sometimes dont feel like typing but I use voice dictation, that should be the first option in a text convo imo.
- therealdrag0 28d agoI use dictation a lot and god it’s so bad. I have to correct something every single time.
- account42 27d agoWhich is part of the reason why sending a voice message that the receiver might have to read a transcription of is so bad.
- anotherevan 27d agoYou just gave me strong memories of using voice messages for a couple of months some years ago. In my defence, I had dropped a circular saw blade through the tip of my finger which slowed down my typing for a while. (I did manage to get surprisingly fast as a nine-finger touch typist, sans the left index finger.) Fortunately my colleagues were very understanding, and I reverted back to text once I could type reasonably well and with minimal pain again.
- blensor 26d agoI absolutely understand that some situations require voice messages, and I think everyone else in a chat would too. Also, circular sawblades are terrifying.
- laurex 27d agoGod forbid...? Our technology has led us to compartmentalize information exchange and relational interaction. We just don't have time for the latter. But in text, tone and context are often lost, and it is also less accessible to type for many people. I'm interested in what it looks like when we normalize the actual friction of being in relationship, not just prioitize the "time savings" to recipients of communication by boiling it down to the information conveyed only by the words.