The recent chat bot advances have pretty much changed my life. I used to get anxiety by receiving mails and IMs, sometimes even from friends. I lost friendships over not replying. My main issue being that I am sometimes get completely stuck in a loop of how to formulate things in the best way to the point of just abandoning the contact. I went to therapy for that and it helped. But the LLM advancements of the recent years have been a game changer.
Now I plop everything into ChatGPT, cleaning out personal information as much as possible, and let the machine write. Often I’ll make some adjustments but just having a starting point has changed my life.
So, my answer, I use it all the fucking time.
Never and if I found out someone did this to me I would be very insulted.
If you can’t genuinely talk with me without the need for an llm then I’d say we weren’t really friends to begin with.
I used it once to tone down a comment I thought was too cutting. Edited, of course.
First of all, I can really empathize with your anxieties. I’ve lost contact with a few penpals years ago because of similar issues and I still hate myself for it.
I don’t use chat-gpt for writing my replies, because my English is crap and my manner of writing distinct enough that any friend can immediately spot a real response from a generated one (not enough smileys for one :)
But I still have similar anxieties. So if I feel anxious about writing something, I do sometimes give a general description of the original mail (“A friend of mine wrote about her mother’s funeral”, “a family member lost his cat”, etc.) and give it the reply I’ve written so far (names and personal details removed).
I then explain that I feel anxious about my reply and worry if I hit the right tone. I never ask it to write for me, only to give critique where necessary and advice on how to improve (for good measure I always add some snide remarks on how it sounds too fake to ever pass as a human so don’t even bother trying, which it always takes in good humor because… well… AI :)
I ignore most of the suggestions because it sounds like a corporate HR communique. But, what’s more important is that it usually tries to tell me that I was thoughtful, considerate and that that little light-hearted joke at the end was just sweet enough to add a personal touch without coming across as insensitive.
Just to get some positive feedback, even from software that was designed specifically for that purpose, gives me that little push to hit the send button and hope for the best. I wouldn’t dare to ask someone else for advice because it would be an admission of how weak and insecure I feel about expressing myself in the first place, which would ramp up my anxiety by making it a ‘big thing’.Anyway, I can understand the animosity people show against AI. And I’m happy for those who don’t need or want it.
PS: This reply was 100% written without any use of AI, direct or indirectly. I did spend a good half hour on it before feeling confident enough to hit “Post” :)
This is pretty much how I use it as well!! I wasn’t very detailed in the op.
And yes, the positive feedback is gold!
Never.
Very similar experience for me, I used to procrastinate a lot. I still do, but now it’s less about not knowing how to approach the message.
I’d say I use it about 30% of the time, usually when the message or email is important or I want to make sure it won’t be misinterpreted
Initially I used it a lot more, but after a while I got more confident that I could just do it myself. Often it would just say the same thing I said, but reworded in a more complicated way
Your last paragraph is interesting! I can feel similar effects actually. I feel more and more confident in the way I would reply. Most of the times I know what and how to write, seeing that validated helps.
And ChatGPT has definitely a tendency for complicated wording.
Add the instruction “use simple terms” to your prompts, should improve your results in that scenario.
I try not to. With work email, you should write it as short and to the point as possible, no one really has time to read an essay instead of trying to get their job done.
Part of the reason I use Lemmy is for writing practice, because I want to prove that as a person that I can’t be replaced by an AI. This place basically forces me to think on my feet to write quickly on an ever changing set of random topics and get my point across clearly and effectively.
There’s a sidequest in Like A Dragon Gaiden that literally mocks the danger of using AI to do this. I don’t know your position but I’m sure your friends aren’t gonna mind if you just send them a sentence response.
I’ve found in my life the more I think about how I should reply the more likely I am to say something they dislike, I’ll overthink and add something that infers I’m not talking about X. And the reply will come back “If you aren’t talking about X, why did you bring it up?”
Never.
Did you use ai to write this post?
No actually! It’s not a problem for me to write text per se. Actually it’s a significant part of my job to write guidelines, documentation, etc.
What’s difficult about replying to people is putting my opinions in relation to the other’s expectations.
I tell people I have “phone anxiety”… but it sucks. Family, friends, new acquaintances… it doesn’t matter, trying to reply or answer a phone can feel like torture sometimes. Have absolutely lost a few friends over this. You’re not alone
Did you use AI to write THAT response?
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When I Text people I don’t know well I use goblin tools that uses chat gpt to “translate” how I speak to neurotypical speak, which generally makes them not hate me for being without all the added fillers. Also great for professional emails and text because it makes me look a lot “smarter” because of all the buzz words and phrases it adds for me.
The one time I drafted an email using ai, I was told off as being " incredibly inappropriate " so heck no. I have no idea what was inappropriate either, it looked fine to me. Spooky that I can’t notice the issues, so I don’t touch it
If you’re using it right then there’d be no way for the recipient to even tell whether you’d used it, though. Did you forget to edit a line that began with “As a large language model”?
Once you know someone is using it, it’s very easy to know when you’re reading AI generated text. It lacks tone and any sense of identity.
While I don’t mind it in theory, I am left with the feeling of “well if you can’t be bothered with this conversation…”
With a little care in prompting you can get an AI to generate text with a very different tone than whatever its “default” is.
Yeah, you can, which is why it’s lazy af when someone just serves you some default wikipedia-voice answer.
My point is largely this: I can talk to AI without a human being involved. They become an unnecessary middle man who adds nothing of use other than copying and pasting responses. The downside of this is I no longer value their opinion or expertise, and that’s the feedback they’ll get from me at performance review time.
I’ve told one individual already that they must critically assess solutions provided to them by ChatGPT as, if they don’t, I’ll call them out on it.
They become an unnecessary middle man who adds nothing of use other than copying and pasting responses.
This, I hate it so much when people take it on themselves to insert Chat GPT responses into social media threads. If I wanted to know what the LLM has to say I would have just asked the LLM.
On the flipside, I’m kind of annoyed by posts cluttering up places like asklemmy that could be trivially answered by asking an AI (or even just a simple search engine). I can understand the opinion-type questions or the ones with a social aspect to them that you can reasonably want an actual human to give you advice on (like this one), but nowadays the purely factual stuff is mostly a solved problem. So when those get asked anyway I’m often sorely tempted to copy and paste an AI answer simply as a https://letmegooglethat.com/ style passive aggressive rebuke.
Fortunately my inner asshole is well chained. I don’t release him for such trivialities. :)
I mean, with the vast majority of inter-departmental emails, no, one can’t be bothered, because it’s pointless busywork communication.
Not in my role, but I can see how that happens elsewhere.
😆
“I’m not a cat!”
- says a cat through the Webcam.
Please share this email lol, I wanna see it
ChatGPT, write an email to my boss explaining how much I want to plow his wife
Maybe what you’re doing with artificial intelligence isn’t exactly a good idea.
No, and I’d say it’s probably not the solution to your problem that you think it is.
Reading the rest of these comments, I can’t help but agree. If I found out a friend, family member, or coworker was answering me with chatgpt I’d be pretty pissed. Not only would they be feeding my private conversation to a third party, but they can’t even be bothered to formulate an answer to me. What am I, chopped liver? If others find out you’re doing this, it might be pretty bad for you.
Additionally, you yourself aren’t getting better at answering emails and messages. You’ll give people the wrong impression about how you are as a person, and the difference between the two tones could be confusing or make them suspicious - not that you’re using chatgpt, but that there’s something fake.
This is in the same ballpark as digital friends or significant others. Those don’t help with isolation, they just make you more isolated. Using chatgpt like this doesn’t make you a better communicator, it just stops you from practicing that skill.
even be bothered to formulate an answer to me. What am I, chopped liver?
OP isn’t doing this because they don’t care. It’s the exact opposite. They care so much and stress so much about it that they have difficulty in expressing themselves.
I agree that I don’t think it’s helpful for OP to continue doing this long term, but all of these comments here are so judgemental to OP.
You’re right, but I expect a lot of people are going to have that reaction. It will feel to them like a slight and an invasion of privacy. OP has to find a way to deal with the anxiety; this is an unhealthy coping mechanism.
Showing ChatGPT how to respond to my messages sounds like more work than just replying to them myself.
