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The public reject the use of ChatGPT – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 12,645
edited August 22 in General
The public reject the use of ChatGPT – politicalbetting.com

60% of Britons say it's unacceptable for MPs to use ChatGPT to respond to constituents' mail, following MP Mike Reader being witnessed using the tool on a train to reply to a constituent's emailAcceptable: 25%Unacceptable: 60%yougov.co.uk/topics/techn…

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Comments

  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 10,263
    I suppose if you were only going to send vacuous boilerplate anyway that's as good a method as any.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 15,876
    I have some sympathy for Mike Reader here. I seen no reason why chatgpt shouldn't be used to help shape words into the right order. It's only like getting an underling to do the drafting.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 64,584
    They'd better get used to it
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 19,819
    People write to their MPs because they want to be heard and understood. Having ChatGPT meditate that isn't going to help with that.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 19,819
    Cookie said:

    I have some sympathy for Mike Reader here. I seen no reason why chatgpt shouldn't be used to help shape words into the right order. It's only like getting an underling to do the drafting.

    I suspect the numbers might not be all that different if you put "assistant" instead of "ChatGPT".

    People want that direct connection to their MP.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 33,711
    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    Thousands illegally claiming child benefit while living abroad
    Investigation stops £17m entering the accounts of people ineligible for scheme

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/22/thousands-moving-abroad-illegally-claiming-child-benefits/

    Sounds like a job for AI.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 64,584

    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
    Kids are growing up with these bots and use them incessantly. Universities are being destroyed by them. They will become universal and ubiquitous

    That said, as someone mentioned on the prior thread, there is a definite subset of young people that hate them, and want nothing to do with them

    My older daughter is one. Loathes the whole idea. And no, that's not (solely) because I keep banging on about it, she says some of her friends feel the same and her half sister - my other daughter - in Australia is the same: and I've never brought up the subject once, with her
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 20,809
    edited August 22
    I use AI every day at work, but as an aid and a checker, a bit like spellcheck, not to draft things for me.

    Sometimes it’s brilliant, and sometimes it’s shite. Unfortunately you have to know the subject to a certain level to know which one.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 61,178
    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 55,712
    No ChatGPT in our thread headers - or there wouldn't be deliberate mistakes!

    "I suspect MPs who use ChatGPT to reply to constituents..."
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 55,712

    Thousands illegally claiming child benefit while living abroad
    Investigation stops £17m entering the accounts of people ineligible for scheme

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/22/thousands-moving-abroad-illegally-claiming-child-benefits/

    Sounds like a job for AI.

    Be curious to see the countries they have moved to...
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 40,572
    Reject AI, say no to clankers.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 123,409

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    edited August 22

    Thousands illegally claiming child benefit while living abroad
    Investigation stops £17m entering the accounts of people ineligible for scheme

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/22/thousands-moving-abroad-illegally-claiming-child-benefits/

    Sounds like a job for AI.

    Be curious to see the countries they have moved to...
    I don't think you totally remove humans from the loop, but seems like an ideal job for a ML model to guide investigators to cases which are highly likely to be sus.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 33,711

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I do.

    Granted, my letter writing style has been ripped off from other correspondents over the years, but the resultant word soup is entirely my own work.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 123,409

    No ChatGPT in our thread headers - or there wouldn't be deliberate mistakes!

    "I suspect MPs who use ChatGPT to reply to constituents..."

    It’s the same reason I don’t use voice dictation, the software doesn’t like my accent, which has been described as if Jimmy Carr was from Yorkshire or if Brian Blessed went to Cambridge.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    Has Trump made some new announcement on crypto? The market has just shot up.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 40,572
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
    Kids are growing up with these bots and use them incessantly. Universities are being destroyed by them. They will become universal and ubiquitous

    That said, as someone mentioned on the prior thread, there is a definite subset of young people that hate them, and want nothing to do with them

    My older daughter is one. Loathes the whole idea. And no, that's not (solely) because I keep banging on about it, she says some of her friends feel the same and her half sister - my other daughter - in Australia is the same: and I've never brought up the subject once, with her
    ChatGPT is rotting the brains of kids. They are genuinely losing their ability to think and reason properly. Not just kids tbf, loads of adults too. A CTO in one of my previous workplaces is now just a walking, talking LLM prompt response. There's no question too big or too small where he won't use Claude. He was shit at the job anyway but apparently it's now so bad that even the grunts are starting to notice that the AI has taken over his brain.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 33,711
    OMG! This poor old boy who painted the planes at Brize Norton has just been remanded in custody until January.

    I am expecting a PB outrage in three, two, one...
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 123,409

    Has Trump made some new announcement on crypto? The market has just shot up.

    There’s some rumours doing the rounds which if true makes me question if I want to work in this sector.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 11,618
    rcs1000 said:

    Sandpit / Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    I used them for a year and didn't have issues with litter, but did have a problem with people parking them in weird places because the car club spots get used by other drivers (with very little enforcement). That meant an awkward conversation on the phone as they used a version of AirTag to track it down. On one occasion I had to run 5K to fetch another one; not great when you're picking up 4 pals and heading to the mountains.

    A very large chunk of the urban population use their cars (or are least their second car) only very occasionally. I think it could transform cities and open up land worth billions for housing, parks, cycle lanes and so on. The scale just isn't there yet though.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 56,618
    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    There needs to be a way to reject a car because of condition, which takes the car offline and sends it to a service centre for a valet. The service centre needs to be able to charge the previous renter for cleaning and loss of use in egregious cases such as a car covered in food or sick.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 56,547

    OMG! This poor old boy who painted the planes at Brize Norton has just been remanded in custody until January.

    I am expecting a PB outrage in three, two, one...

    Criminal damage into 6 or 7 figures. I believe he has said he would do it again...
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 11,618
    edited August 22

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 32,448
    New sail-backed dinosaur species unearthed on the Isle of Wight
    https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2025/august/new-sail-backed-dinosaur-species-unearthed-isle-of-wight.html

    But how big is this new dinosaur? Disappointingly, the authors compare it to an American bison, because everything else has been sold to America so why not?
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 25,636
    FPT
    nico67 said:

    There was a very high profile case a while back where a UK jury returned a not guilty verdict even though the evidence seemed conclusive and it’s really bugging me as I can’t remember what the subject matter was .

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Ponting

    Such verdicts are known as "perverse verdicts"
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 123,409
    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    I am noted for my pith in emails.

    I regularly send one word emails.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 37,105

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    Why not go back to writing letters with a fountain pen, affixing a stamp, and depositing it in the nearest post box?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 64,584
    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    Zipcar insist you take photos of the exterior and interior before you start and at the end. The images are apparently processed in seconds, so I presume they have a robot scanning them (to make sure you've not trashed the car) not some poor sap in Bangalore. Or they are processed later?

    Either way it's very efficient, delays you by about 30 seconds, and seems to work. Why can't Waymo use the same tech?
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 39,417

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    edited August 22
    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 80,586
    The public are quite right.
    MPs should probably use Claude.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 25,636

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    I am noted for my pith in emails.

    I regularly send one word emails.
    You appear to be taking the pith. Besides, Arkell v Pressdram is three words. :):):):)
  • RobDRobD Posts: 60,659
    Andy_JS said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    Why not go back to writing letters with a fountain pen, affixing a stamp, and depositing it in the nearest post box?
    I wouldn’t get anything else productive done?
  • Pro_RataPro_Rata Posts: 5,717
    "I'm a Reader, not a writer"
  • CookieCookie Posts: 15,876

    Cookie said:

    I have some sympathy for Mike Reader here. I seen no reason why chatgpt shouldn't be used to help shape words into the right order. It's only like getting an underling to do the drafting.

    I suspect the numbers might not be all that different if you put "assistant" instead of "ChatGPT".

    People want that direct connection to their MP.
    People also want the lives of MPs to be unnecessarily austere. You get a similar response about MPs travelling first class. I suspect that is some of the driver.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    edited August 22
    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 39,417
    RobD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    Why not go back to writing letters with a fountain pen, affixing a stamp, and depositing it in the nearest post box?
    I wouldn’t get anything else productive done?
    One thing I discovered when doing my MA was just how prolific early 19th century people were at writing (or dictating), letters, sending them off like emails.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 80,586

    OMG! This poor old boy who painted the planes at Brize Norton has just been remanded in custody until January.

    I am expecting a PB outrage in three, two, one...

    Gives me an excuse to FPT.

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Starmer’s next nightmare, it looks like she’s going to be talking.

    https://x.com/danwootton/status/1958850506144592039

    Allison Pearson, Lucy Connolly, Dan Wootton.

    Nightmare? Depends what she's going to say. Can't say she was framed as she pled guilty. Can't say she was entrapped to plead guilty as she didn't raise that as a point of appeal. Can't say that she didn't say what she said.

    So.....? Have her as the mouthpiece for the "send the darkies home" campaign? That won't give Starmer too many sleepless nights.
    The government’s worst case scenario is probably that she says something that’s clearly in breach of her licence conditions, and someone has to decide whether to recall her.

    That, or she gives a bland interview on UK TV then heads off to the US podcast circuit. Is she allowed to travel?

    She’s somewhat more articulate and photogenic than “Tommy”.
    She has a fairly narrow path to follow. She doesn't want to get into trouble with the law, but (I'm guessing) she does want to generate a lot of sympathy for her position. It's also perfectly possible that she turns away some of the people who were instinctively sympathetic to her. Or she may be able to use her situation to her own advantage.

    The choice of channel and interviewer is interesting.

    I hope she's getting good advice. There'll be lots of people wanting to use her.
    Given she's now free, what sympathy does she expect ?
    Perhaps sympathy for being

    1. Held on remand because starmer wanted it

    2. Bullied into pleading guilty

    3. Being given a ridiculously long jail sentence for a misjudged tweet

    4. Being madly mistreated while in jail

    5. Even as Labour councillors get off scot free for publicly demanding the slitting of throats
    Links for all those allegations from reputable sources please..

    Some of those comments can get the site into trouble.
    Leon's turned into quite the bleeding heart liberal. On a selective basis.

    I made my feelings quite clear some time back that she deserved a custodial sentence, but one of that length was unnecessary, exemplary or otherwise. (FWIW)
    I've a certain amount of sympathy for anyone who falls foul of the law as a result of their own stupidity, but it's a limited amount of sympathy. And I can't say she stands out above the rest.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 64,584
    Eabhal said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Sandpit / Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    I used them for a year and didn't have issues with litter, but did have a problem with people parking them in weird places because the car club spots get used by other drivers (with very little enforcement). That meant an awkward conversation on the phone as they used a version of AirTag to track it down. On one occasion I had to run 5K to fetch another one; not great when you're picking up 4 pals and heading to the mountains.

    A very large chunk of the urban population use their cars (or are least their second car) only very occasionally. I think it could transform cities and open up land worth billions for housing, parks, cycle lanes and so on. The scale just isn't there yet though.
    It probably works best in really big cities. I've never had the issues with parking, for example, but that's because legal parking is ruthlessly enforced in London, as it makes so much money for councils
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 123,409
    viewcode said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    I am noted for my pith in emails.

    I regularly send one word emails.
    You appear to be taking the pith. Besides, Arkell v Pressdram is three words. :):):):)
    Nah, I mentioned last week that one time at work we in a protracted dispute with an external party with letters via email getting sent regularly.

    One time their side sent me a 9,000 word letter, I read it, then replied with ‘noted’ and their guy replied with some very unprofessional language, they never recovered.

    My smugness levels hit a new peak and I was even more unbearable for weeks after.

    I have occasionally replied to people with I refer you to Pressdram’s reply in Arkell v Pressdram
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 39,417

    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
    I am entirely confident in my ability to do so, because I'm expressing my own thoughts, not somebody else's.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 46,956
    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
    Kids are growing up with these bots and use them incessantly. Universities are being destroyed by them. They will become universal and ubiquitous

    That said, as someone mentioned on the prior thread, there is a definite subset of young people that hate them, and want nothing to do with them

    My older daughter is one. Loathes the whole idea. And no, that's not (solely) because I keep banging on about it, she says some of her friends feel the same and her half sister - my other daughter - in Australia is the same: and I've never brought up the subject once, with her
    ChatGPT is rotting the brains of kids. They are genuinely losing their ability to think and reason properly. Not just kids tbf, loads of adults too. A CTO in one of my previous workplaces is now just a walking, talking LLM prompt response. There's no question too big or too small where he won't use Claude. He was shit at the job anyway but apparently it's now so bad that even the grunts are starting to notice that the AI has taken over his brain.
    I can't spell now and the reason for that is spellchecker. Also due to keyboards my handwriting is illegible. Tech has reduced me to the level of a small child in this respect.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 20,809

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    I am noted for my pith in emails.

    I regularly send one word emails.
    “Noted”
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 9,573

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 61,178
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    Zipcar insist you take photos of the exterior and interior before you start and at the end. The images are apparently processed in seconds, so I presume they have a robot scanning them (to make sure you've not trashed the car) not some poor sap in Bangalore. Or they are processed later?

    Either way it's very efficient, delays you by about 30 seconds, and seems to work. Why can't Waymo use the same tech?
    They can, and they will.

    But they're like any sensible startup: get it launched, move quickly, and only fix things when when people complain about them.

    Waymo - a year from now - will have automatic scanning (which will also make sure you haven't left your phone behind), and if you leave trash more than once, will charge you a fee or ban you from the system. It's just not there yet.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 123,409
    edited August 22
    The other reason I write my own emails is that some of you may have spotted I like to slip in an innuendo every now and then.

    AI cannot do that.

    I also used to put in song titles in professional letters, AI cannot do that either, people appreciate that personal touch/style.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 61,178
    Sandpit said:

    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    There needs to be a way to reject a car because of condition, which takes the car offline and sends it to a service centre for a valet. The service centre needs to be able to charge the previous renter for cleaning and loss of use in egregious cases such as a car covered in food or sick.
    Exactly. (Fortunately, I've never had the vomit situation, but I know that it happens late at night. Not least because really drunk people prefer to get a Waymo because there's no one to complain if they vomit.)
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 123,409
    rcs1000 said:

    Sandpit said:

    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    There needs to be a way to reject a car because of condition, which takes the car offline and sends it to a service centre for a valet. The service centre needs to be able to charge the previous renter for cleaning and loss of use in egregious cases such as a car covered in food or sick.
    Exactly. (Fortunately, I've never had the vomit situation, but I know that it happens late at night. Not least because really drunk people prefer to get a Waymo because there's no one to complain if they vomit.)
    Give me an Uber Lux or Uber Exec any day.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 15,876
    kinabalu said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
    Kids are growing up with these bots and use them incessantly. Universities are being destroyed by them. They will become universal and ubiquitous

    That said, as someone mentioned on the prior thread, there is a definite subset of young people that hate them, and want nothing to do with them

    My older daughter is one. Loathes the whole idea. And no, that's not (solely) because I keep banging on about it, she says some of her friends feel the same and her half sister - my other daughter - in Australia is the same: and I've never brought up the subject once, with her
    ChatGPT is rotting the brains of kids. They are genuinely losing their ability to think and reason properly. Not just kids tbf, loads of adults too. A CTO in one of my previous workplaces is now just a walking, talking LLM prompt response. There's no question too big or too small where he won't use Claude. He was shit at the job anyway but apparently it's now so bad that even the grunts are starting to notice that the AI has taken over his brain.
    I can't spell now and the reason for that is spellchecker. Also due to keyboards my handwriting is illegible. Tech has reduced me to the level of a small child in this respect.
    My ire is reserved for those who now cannot navigate without satnav, even around their own home town. And for those who trust satnav over the bloke in the passenger seat who has lived round here most of his life and made this exact journey numerous times. Particularly if they're in a Tesla.
  • DopermeanDopermean Posts: 1,435
    Nigelb said:

    OMG! This poor old boy who painted the planes at Brize Norton has just been remanded in custody until January.

    I am expecting a PB outrage in three, two, one...

    Gives me an excuse to FPT.

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Starmer’s next nightmare, it looks like she’s going to be talking.

    https://x.com/danwootton/status/1958850506144592039

    Allison Pearson, Lucy Connolly, Dan Wootton.

    Nightmare? Depends what she's going to say. Can't say she was framed as she pled guilty. Can't say she was entrapped to plead guilty as she didn't raise that as a point of appeal. Can't say that she didn't say what she said.

    So.....? Have her as the mouthpiece for the "send the darkies home" campaign? That won't give Starmer too many sleepless nights.
    The government’s worst case scenario is probably that she says something that’s clearly in breach of her licence conditions, and someone has to decide whether to recall her.

    That, or she gives a bland interview on UK TV then heads off to the US podcast circuit. Is she allowed to travel?

    She’s somewhat more articulate and photogenic than “Tommy”.
    She has a fairly narrow path to follow. She doesn't want to get into trouble with the law, but (I'm guessing) she does want to generate a lot of sympathy for her position. It's also perfectly possible that she turns away some of the people who were instinctively sympathetic to her. Or she may be able to use her situation to her own advantage.

    The choice of channel and interviewer is interesting.

    I hope she's getting good advice. There'll be lots of people wanting to use her.
    Given she's now free, what sympathy does she expect ?
    Perhaps sympathy for being

    1. Held on remand because starmer wanted it

    2. Bullied into pleading guilty

    3. Being given a ridiculously long jail sentence for a misjudged tweet

    4. Being madly mistreated while in jail

    5. Even as Labour councillors get off scot free for publicly demanding the slitting of throats
    Links for all those allegations from reputable sources please..

    Some of those comments can get the site into trouble.
    Leon's turned into quite the bleeding heart liberal. On a selective basis.

    I made my feelings quite clear some time back that she deserved a custodial sentence, but one of that length was unnecessary, exemplary or otherwise. (FWIW)
    I've a certain amount of sympathy for anyone who falls foul of the law as a result of their own stupidity, but it's a limited amount of sympathy. And I can't say she stands out above the rest.
    All criminals fall foul of the law because of their own stupidity, cleverer people either get away with it or don't offend.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 56,618
    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    The end result of this, and we are nearly there, is for the sender to have the AI turn his 100 word summary into a 2,000 word email, and for all the recipients to have an AI ask for a 100 word summary of it.

    It should have been 100 words in the first place, indeed it was, but the sender needed to make sure that those *copied* in the email such as his boss and his boss, could see that there was a couple of day’s’ work in the 2,000 word version.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 64,584
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    Zipcar insist you take photos of the exterior and interior before you start and at the end. The images are apparently processed in seconds, so I presume they have a robot scanning them (to make sure you've not trashed the car) not some poor sap in Bangalore. Or they are processed later?

    Either way it's very efficient, delays you by about 30 seconds, and seems to work. Why can't Waymo use the same tech?
    They can, and they will.

    But they're like any sensible startup: get it launched, move quickly, and only fix things when when people complain about them.

    Waymo - a year from now - will have automatic scanning (which will also make sure you haven't left your phone behind), and if you leave trash more than once, will charge you a fee or ban you from the system. It's just not there yet.
    Oh I am sure they will

    I am eagerly awaiting our driverless, private-car-less future

    It is going to be utterly transformative for big cities, and make them SO much nicer and greener (and we will save so much money - and also lives)
  • TazTaz Posts: 20,649
    Carney, a pretty crap Bank of England Governor, folds

    Canada cancels many reciprocal tariffs as Olive branch to Trump.

    https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/1958905577611932025?s=61
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 39,417
    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
    One of my hobbies is fanfiction. I would not dream of using AI, even if it can produce prose in the style of Hemmingway, or Faulkner, or other great writers because:

    1. I want to write what it is in my own mind,
    2. Like any other body part, the brain needs exercise
    3. I have a peculiar sense of humour.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 64,584
    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
    Worse, this is happening at universities. Students are using ChatGPT (or Claude or Grok etc) to write essays.... and professors are using ChatGPT to read and mark them

    "An existential crisis’: can universities survive ChatGPT?"


    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/an-existential-crisis-can-universities-survive-chatgpt-7r38r72sv
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 33,711

    OMG! This poor old boy who painted the planes at Brize Norton has just been remanded in custody until January.

    I am expecting a PB outrage in three, two, one...

    Criminal damage into 6 or 7 figures. I believe he has said he would do it again...
    Two Tier Kier!
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    edited August 22
    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
    I am sure that is true. They are misusing the technology and I am fairly certain in the near future business will be forced to change as plucky start-ups will show how you can do things much more efficiently and with fewer staff.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 20,809
    Leon said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
    Worse, this is happening at universities. Students are using ChatGPT (or Claude or Grok etc) to write essays.... and professors are using ChatGPT to read and mark them

    "An existential crisis’: can universities survive ChatGPT?"


    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/an-existential-crisis-can-universities-survive-chatgpt-7r38r72sv
    It’s simple - all assessments should include a verbal “viva” element. AI is great for learning but you actually have to learn to be able to talk about something.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    edited August 22
    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
    I am entirely confident in my ability to do so, because I'm expressing my own thoughts, not somebody else's.
    No offense, but that sounds rather luddite. One thing LLMs are absolutely amazing at is aping your own style of writing. And that just the general models. You already you can personally fine tune these things, and they really don't need that much training data to be able to become incredible at mimicking style.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 46,956
    Sandpit said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    The end result of this, and we are nearly there, is for the sender to have the AI turn his 100 word summary into a 2,000 word email, and for all the recipients to have an AI ask for a 100 word summary of it.

    It should have been 100 words in the first place, indeed it was, but the sender needed to make sure that those *copied* in the email such as his boss and his boss, could see that there was a couple of day’s’ work in the 2,000 word version.
    Jenrick's clearly doing it. Give me 500 words on small boats and hotels that racists will like but without actually saying "Britain is for white people" and include the phrase "enough is enough".
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 45,057

    The other reason I write my own emails is that some of you may have spotted I like to slip in an innuendo every now and then.

    AI cannot do that.

    I also used to put in song titles in professional letters, AI cannot do that either, people appreciate that personal touch/style.

    AI can do the latter, surely. Doesn't need the innuendo part of your brain. Just a database of song titles.

    Of course, the subtlety might not be there.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 39,417

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
    I am entirely confident in my ability to do so, because I'm expressing my own thoughts, not somebody else's.
    No offense, but that sounds rather luddite. One thing LLMs are absolutely amazing at is aping your own style of writing.
    "Aping" being the operative word. I'd prefer to write the original.

    There are any number of things that I could get other people, or other things, to do for me, but which I prefer to do for myself.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 11,618
    edited August 22
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    Zipcar insist you take photos of the exterior and interior before you start and at the end. The images are apparently processed in seconds, so I presume they have a robot scanning them (to make sure you've not trashed the car) not some poor sap in Bangalore. Or they are processed later?

    Either way it's very efficient, delays you by about 30 seconds, and seems to work. Why can't Waymo use the same tech?
    They can, and they will.

    But they're like any sensible startup: get it launched, move quickly, and only fix things when when people complain about them.

    Waymo - a year from now - will have automatic scanning (which will also make sure you haven't left your phone behind), and if you leave trash more than once, will charge you a fee or ban you from the system. It's just not there yet.
    Oh I am sure they will

    I am eagerly awaiting our driverless, private-car-less future

    It is going to be utterly transformative for big cities, and make them SO much nicer and greener (and we will save so much money - and also lives)
    Do you ever look at old photos of our cities and wonder why they look so neat, with clean lines and open spaces? It's because we have covered our public realm with the infrastructure required for human drivers; traffic lights, signs, road markings. We even pull up setts (cobbles) and replace with tarmac, remove trees to increase visibility and so on.

    That can all change in the future.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 45,057
    Sean_F said:

    RobD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    Why not go back to writing letters with a fountain pen, affixing a stamp, and depositing it in the nearest post box?
    I wouldn’t get anything else productive done?
    One thing I discovered when doing my MA was just how prolific early 19th century people were at writing (or dictating), letters, sending them off like emails.
    And the Post Office collected and delivered them almost as quickly.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 11,618
    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
    This is exactly what I do.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 56,547
    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    Zipcar insist you take photos of the exterior and interior before you start and at the end. The images are apparently processed in seconds, so I presume they have a robot scanning them (to make sure you've not trashed the car) not some poor sap in Bangalore. Or they are processed later?

    Either way it's very efficient, delays you by about 30 seconds, and seems to work. Why can't Waymo use the same tech?
    They can, and they will.

    But they're like any sensible startup: get it launched, move quickly, and only fix things when when people complain about them.

    Waymo - a year from now - will have automatic scanning (which will also make sure you haven't left your phone behind), and if you leave trash more than once, will charge you a fee or ban you from the system. It's just not there yet.
    Oh I am sure they will

    I am eagerly awaiting our driverless, private-car-less future

    It is going to be utterly transformative for big cities, and make them SO much nicer and greener (and we will save so much money - and also lives)
    Do you ever look at old photos of our cities and wonder why they look so neat, with clean lines and open spaces? It's because we have covered our public realm with the infrastructure required for human drivers; traffic lights, signs, road markings. We even pull up setts (cobbles) and replace with tarmac, remove trees to increase visibility and so on.

    That can all change in the future.
    I recently scared a Green by a sketch of what a world using ground effect electric flying vehicles could be like.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 123,409
    Carnyx said:

    The other reason I write my own emails is that some of you may have spotted I like to slip in an innuendo every now and then.

    AI cannot do that.

    I also used to put in song titles in professional letters, AI cannot do that either, people appreciate that personal touch/style.

    AI can do the latter, surely. Doesn't need the innuendo part of your brain. Just a database of song titles.

    Of course, the subtlety might not be there.
    Subtlety has always been my hallmark.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 46,956
    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
    Kids are growing up with these bots and use them incessantly. Universities are being destroyed by them. They will become universal and ubiquitous

    That said, as someone mentioned on the prior thread, there is a definite subset of young people that hate them, and want nothing to do with them

    My older daughter is one. Loathes the whole idea. And no, that's not (solely) because I keep banging on about it, she says some of her friends feel the same and her half sister - my other daughter - in Australia is the same: and I've never brought up the subject once, with her
    ChatGPT is rotting the brains of kids. They are genuinely losing their ability to think and reason properly. Not just kids tbf, loads of adults too. A CTO in one of my previous workplaces is now just a walking, talking LLM prompt response. There's no question too big or too small where he won't use Claude. He was shit at the job anyway but apparently it's now so bad that even the grunts are starting to notice that the AI has taken over his brain.
    I can't spell now and the reason for that is spellchecker. Also due to keyboards my handwriting is illegible. Tech has reduced me to the level of a small child in this respect.
    My ire is reserved for those who now cannot navigate without satnav, even around their own home town. And for those who trust satnav over the bloke in the passenger seat who has lived round here most of his life and made this exact journey numerous times. Particularly if they're in a Tesla.
    Yes that's another piece of tech that destroys your native abilities, in that case sense of direction and spatial awareness. In general if you removed all these aids from us and put us back in competition with primordial man we'd be toast.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    edited August 22
    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
    I am entirely confident in my ability to do so, because I'm expressing my own thoughts, not somebody else's.
    No offense, but that sounds rather luddite. One thing LLMs are absolutely amazing at is aping your own style of writing.
    "Aping" being the operative word. I'd prefer to write the original.

    There are any number of things that I could get other people, or other things, to do for me, but which I prefer to do for myself.
    I am not going to convince you otherwise, but despite a lot of the AGI is just around the corner is BS, manipulating text and writing better prose than the vast majority of humans are capable of is already here today. Its a bit like saying I like my typewriter because I like the physical sound of the hammers hitting the page compared to modern word processing.

    Same as people saying I write all my own code from scratch because I think I am an top tier coder. Good luck convincing employers with that one. Its the fastest way of not getting the job.
  • RogerRoger Posts: 20,936
    Taz said:

    Carney, a pretty crap Bank of England Governor, folds

    Canada cancels many reciprocal tariffs as Olive branch to Trump.

    https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/1958905577611932025?s=61

    Are you an economist? Most people seem to think he did a good job as BoE governor

    It's a bit like Rachel. My shares under her watchful eye have today reached an all-time high So I think she's a genius....

    Reevesy's made me rich!
  • TazTaz Posts: 20,649
    Loving the contortions of people who used to hate John Bolton as a neocon warmonger in the Bush regime, who helped deliver the current state of the middle,east, now trying to go into bat for him as he’s against Trump.

    https://x.com/nypost/status/1958850232843731054?s=61
  • PJHPJH Posts: 895
    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
    Kids are growing up with these bots and use them incessantly. Universities are being destroyed by them. They will become universal and ubiquitous

    That said, as someone mentioned on the prior thread, there is a definite subset of young people that hate them, and want nothing to do with them

    My older daughter is one. Loathes the whole idea. And no, that's not (solely) because I keep banging on about it, she says some of her friends feel the same and her half sister - my other daughter - in Australia is the same: and I've never brought up the subject once, with her
    ChatGPT is rotting the brains of kids. They are genuinely losing their ability to think and reason properly. Not just kids tbf, loads of adults too. A CTO in one of my previous workplaces is now just a walking, talking LLM prompt response. There's no question too big or too small where he won't use Claude. He was shit at the job anyway but apparently it's now so bad that even the grunts are starting to notice that the AI has taken over his brain.
    I can't spell now and the reason for that is spellchecker. Also due to keyboards my handwriting is illegible. Tech has reduced me to the level of a small child in this respect.
    My ire is reserved for those who now cannot navigate without satnav, even around their own home town. And for those who trust satnav over the bloke in the passenger seat who has lived round here most of his life and made this exact journey numerous times. Particularly if they're in a Tesla.
    So much this. I was particularly irked when I had booked a local cab *in advance* to take me to a Golf Club for a party in the middle of nowhere but not that far from my home. I didn't know exactly where it was so when the driver's satnav stopped at a cross roads and he said "where is it?" I said "I don't know, you're the driver" and left him to drive up and down each road in turn until eventually I got bored and asked at the local pub. There was no signal there (within 20 miles of Central London).

    All I know is, if I'd been a local cab driver I'd have known the venue, and if I was new, I'd have checked where it was on the map before setting off. I don't use a cab often but they don't seem to know how to get between even two well-known locations without satnav any more.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 11,618

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
    I am entirely confident in my ability to do so, because I'm expressing my own thoughts, not somebody else's.
    No offense, but that sounds rather luddite. One thing LLMs are absolutely amazing at is aping your own style of writing. And that just the general models. You already you can personally fine tune these things, and they really don't need that much training data to be able to become incredible at mimicking style.
    This is I agree with. The magic recipe:

    - A report you wrote pre-AI that got great feedback
    - Corporate style guide
    - Bullet points that you want included.

    Then there is a protracted back and forth because AI can't read your mind about what you think is important; providing a motivation or underlying strategy can help though.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 123,409
    I'm confused how a cemetery can raise its funeral prices and blame it on the cost of living!
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 39,417

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
    I am entirely confident in my ability to do so, because I'm expressing my own thoughts, not somebody else's.
    No offense, but that sounds rather luddite. One thing LLMs are absolutely amazing at is aping your own style of writing.
    "Aping" being the operative word. I'd prefer to write the original.

    There are any number of things that I could get other people, or other things, to do for me, but which I prefer to do for myself.
    I am not going to convince you otherwise, but despite a lot of the AGI is just around the corner is BS, manipulating text and writing better prose than the vast majority of humans are capable of is already here today. Its a bit like saying I like my typewriter because I like the physical sound of the hammers hitting the page compared to modern word processing.

    Same as people saying I write all my own code from scratch because I think I am an top tier coder. Good luck convincing employers with that one. Its the fastest way of not getting the job.
    I am my own employer. I don't need to convince anyone.

    Do you not enjoy exercising your own mind, and expressing what *you* think, on the page?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 75,084

    The other reason I write my own emails is that some of you may have spotted I like to slip in an innuendo every now and then.

    AI cannot do that.

    I also used to put in song titles in professional letters, AI cannot do that either, people appreciate that personal touch/style.

    Are you saying ChatGTP finds it too hard to slip one in?
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 11,618
    edited August 22
    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
    Kids are growing up with these bots and use them incessantly. Universities are being destroyed by them. They will become universal and ubiquitous

    That said, as someone mentioned on the prior thread, there is a definite subset of young people that hate them, and want nothing to do with them

    My older daughter is one. Loathes the whole idea. And no, that's not (solely) because I keep banging on about it, she says some of her friends feel the same and her half sister - my other daughter - in Australia is the same: and I've never brought up the subject once, with her
    ChatGPT is rotting the brains of kids. They are genuinely losing their ability to think and reason properly. Not just kids tbf, loads of adults too. A CTO in one of my previous workplaces is now just a walking, talking LLM prompt response. There's no question too big or too small where he won't use Claude. He was shit at the job anyway but apparently it's now so bad that even the grunts are starting to notice that the AI has taken over his brain.
    I can't spell now and the reason for that is spellchecker. Also due to keyboards my handwriting is illegible. Tech has reduced me to the level of a small child in this respect.
    My ire is reserved for those who now cannot navigate without satnav, even around their own home town. And for those who trust satnav over the bloke in the passenger seat who has lived round here most of his life and made this exact journey numerous times. Particularly if they're in a Tesla.
    This is incredibly important for cycling. I always suggest testing out your commute on a Sunday morning so you can do it from memory, giving you more time and awareness of satnav-using drivers who haven't spotted you.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    edited August 22
    Eabhal said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
    I am entirely confident in my ability to do so, because I'm expressing my own thoughts, not somebody else's.
    No offense, but that sounds rather luddite. One thing LLMs are absolutely amazing at is aping your own style of writing. And that just the general models. You already you can personally fine tune these things, and they really don't need that much training data to be able to become incredible at mimicking style.
    This is I agree with. The magic recipe:

    - A report you wrote pre-AI that got great feedback
    - Corporate style guide
    - Bullet points that you want included.

    Then there is a protracted back and forth because AI can't read your mind about what you think is important; providing a motivation or underlying strategy can help though.
    The last part is really a flaw in the prompt. Which is where the all uber nerds are missing the mark. Software devs think prompting is great, as it is really just another form of coding. Normal humans go what I have to insert xml tags to really highlight the motivation and a outline of the plan, that sounds dumb and harder work.

    But the first years of the internet were like that. All the nerds were this is amazing, I can write this script that does this and that, where as the public were scratching their heads at how that was better. Now of course we have apps for everything, one click purchase, swipe gestures etc.

    In the near future, all of the prompting stuff will be abstracted away behind better UIs.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 39,708
    🚨 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered National Guard troops roaming the streets of Washington DC to be armed with their service weapons
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 75,084

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    Me.
  • TazTaz Posts: 20,649
    edited August 22
    Roger said:

    Taz said:

    Carney, a pretty crap Bank of England Governor, folds

    Canada cancels many reciprocal tariffs as Olive branch to Trump.

    https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/1958905577611932025?s=61

    Are you an economist? Most people seem to think he did a good job as BoE governor

    It's a bit like Rachel. My shares under her watchful eye have today reached an all-time high So I think she's a genius....

    Reevesy's made me rich!
    At least you have the decency to admit it’s not down to your investment skill. Not quite sure how she did it, as opposed to the respective management teams in the businesses, but she’s in such a hole at the moment she’ll take any credit.

    You’re not an economist, you made tampon ads (Ooooh bodyform, bodyform for you-hoo) and did record covers.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 45,057

    New sail-backed dinosaur species unearthed on the Isle of Wight
    https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2025/august/new-sail-backed-dinosaur-species-unearthed-isle-of-wight.html

    But how big is this new dinosaur? Disappointingly, the authors compare it to an American bison, because everything else has been sold to America so why not?

    Coo, thanks. Rather interesting.

    TBF the paper - and the NHM website you link to - does say in one pic it is 2m high. No length given that I can find quickly but then the skeleton is incomplete - possibly preservation but also the main paper says "Unfortunately the excavation site was poached and an unknown amount of the skeleton was taken before collection could be completed."

    So a bison would do - it's the right height, and with a muscular hump, no?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 64,584
    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    Zipcar insist you take photos of the exterior and interior before you start and at the end. The images are apparently processed in seconds, so I presume they have a robot scanning them (to make sure you've not trashed the car) not some poor sap in Bangalore. Or they are processed later?

    Either way it's very efficient, delays you by about 30 seconds, and seems to work. Why can't Waymo use the same tech?
    They can, and they will.

    But they're like any sensible startup: get it launched, move quickly, and only fix things when when people complain about them.

    Waymo - a year from now - will have automatic scanning (which will also make sure you haven't left your phone behind), and if you leave trash more than once, will charge you a fee or ban you from the system. It's just not there yet.
    Oh I am sure they will

    I am eagerly awaiting our driverless, private-car-less future

    It is going to be utterly transformative for big cities, and make them SO much nicer and greener (and we will save so much money - and also lives)
    Do you ever look at old photos of our cities and wonder why they look so neat, with clean lines and open spaces? It's because we have covered our public realm with the infrastructure required for human drivers; traffic lights, signs, road markings. We even pull up setts (cobbles) and replace with tarmac, remove trees to increase visibility and so on.

    That can all change in the future.
    Yes, I absolutely want that. I want our lovely old European car-less cities back
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 45,057

    I'm confused how a cemetery can raise its funeral prices and blame it on the cost of living!

    Rather wondering how someone can imagine an undertakers' firm staffed by zombies.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 80,586

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    I am noted for my pith in emails.

    I regularly send one word emails.
    “Noted”
    You took the pith.
  • PJHPJH Posts: 895
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    @Sandpit / @Leon

    I love Waymo, but you are absolutely right that the lack of a human to enforce "no litter" means people feel free to leave crap in the back of the car. It's never been really gross with me, but I've had a car arrive with most of a MacDonalds meal spread out across the back seat.

    They are - apparently - going to start using cameras to make sure cars are clean prior to arrival. But it is still a work in progress.

    Zipcar insist you take photos of the exterior and interior before you start and at the end. The images are apparently processed in seconds, so I presume they have a robot scanning them (to make sure you've not trashed the car) not some poor sap in Bangalore. Or they are processed later?

    Either way it's very efficient, delays you by about 30 seconds, and seems to work. Why can't Waymo use the same tech?
    They can, and they will.

    But they're like any sensible startup: get it launched, move quickly, and only fix things when when people complain about them.

    Waymo - a year from now - will have automatic scanning (which will also make sure you haven't left your phone behind), and if you leave trash more than once, will charge you a fee or ban you from the system. It's just not there yet.
    Oh I am sure they will

    I am eagerly awaiting our driverless, private-car-less future

    It is going to be utterly transformative for big cities, and make them SO much nicer and greener (and we will save so much money - and also lives)
    Convenience is the key. Sometimes when I need to go, I need to go now, I don't want to spend more than a few minutes ordering and finding a car.

    Also when the day comes, driverless needs to be properly driverless, i.e. I can sit in the back with a mate and drink beer if I feel like it. Until my phone can faultlessly recognise when I've pressed a button, and when I haven't, I won't hold my breath waiting for the arrival of true driverless tech.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 75,084
    edited August 22
    Sean_F said:

    RobD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    Why not go back to writing letters with a fountain pen, affixing a stamp, and depositing it in the nearest post box?
    I wouldn’t get anything else productive done?
    One thing I discovered when doing my MA was just how prolific early 19th century people were at writing (or dictating), letters, sending them off like emails.
    It got worse as the nineteenth century morphed into the twentieth century.

    Lord Haldane wrote to his mother once, frequently twice, a day all her life (and she lived to be very old and he didn't) describing in great detail everything he had done.* That's just his mother, not counting the enormous correspondence he had with everyone else.

    It's not as though they were short letters either.

    As Betsey Trotwood said of Micawber, 'Letters! I believe the man dreams in letters!'

    *This is not in any way slightly disturbing or a reason why he never married.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 64,584
    Leon said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
    Worse, this is happening at universities. Students are using ChatGPT (or Claude or Grok etc) to write essays.... and professors are using ChatGPT to read and mark them

    "An existential crisis’: can universities survive ChatGPT?"


    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/an-existential-crisis-can-universities-survive-chatgpt-7r38r72sv
    I note that I've been saying "universities are doomed" for about two-three years on here, and now suddenly every so-called journalist in the western world is writing this article. "Universities are doomed"

    Pfff! I bet they are reading me on PB. Wankers
  • TazTaz Posts: 20,649
    Eabhal said:

    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
    Kids are growing up with these bots and use them incessantly. Universities are being destroyed by them. They will become universal and ubiquitous

    That said, as someone mentioned on the prior thread, there is a definite subset of young people that hate them, and want nothing to do with them

    My older daughter is one. Loathes the whole idea. And no, that's not (solely) because I keep banging on about it, she says some of her friends feel the same and her half sister - my other daughter - in Australia is the same: and I've never brought up the subject once, with her
    ChatGPT is rotting the brains of kids. They are genuinely losing their ability to think and reason properly. Not just kids tbf, loads of adults too. A CTO in one of my previous workplaces is now just a walking, talking LLM prompt response. There's no question too big or too small where he won't use Claude. He was shit at the job anyway but apparently it's now so bad that even the grunts are starting to notice that the AI has taken over his brain.
    I can't spell now and the reason for that is spellchecker. Also due to keyboards my handwriting is illegible. Tech has reduced me to the level of a small child in this respect.
    My ire is reserved for those who now cannot navigate without satnav, even around their own home town. And for those who trust satnav over the bloke in the passenger seat who has lived round here most of his life and made this exact journey numerous times. Particularly if they're in a Tesla.
    This is incredibly important for cycling. I always suggest testing out your commute on a Sunday morning so you can do it from memory, giving you more time and awareness of satnav-using drivers who haven't spotted you.
    Yeah, that’s good advice. When I first started cycling to work that’s exactly what i did and do you know what the biggest take away I got from it was, clearly not but I’ll tell you, the journey was nowhere near as daunting as I’d expected.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 46,956
    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
    I am entirely confident in my ability to do so, because I'm expressing my own thoughts, not somebody else's.
    No offense, but that sounds rather luddite. One thing LLMs are absolutely amazing at is aping your own style of writing.
    "Aping" being the operative word. I'd prefer to write the original.

    There are any number of things that I could get other people, or other things, to do for me, but which I prefer to do for myself.
    If you're writing for pleasure you surely want to do it yourself. But if it's work I can see how it makes sense to take shortcuts.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sean_F said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    I write my own emails, ChatGPT couldn’t come up with lines like ‘more fucked than a stepmom on Pornhub’ or come up with my awesome puns.
    Same here. Why would I want to use AI to write stuff that I can write better myself? Some people always seek the laziest way out.
    Are you sure you can write better prose or state things more efficiently than SOTA LLMs. I know I certainly can't now.
    I am entirely confident in my ability to do so, because I'm expressing my own thoughts, not somebody else's.
    No offense, but that sounds rather luddite. One thing LLMs are absolutely amazing at is aping your own style of writing.
    "Aping" being the operative word. I'd prefer to write the original.

    There are any number of things that I could get other people, or other things, to do for me, but which I prefer to do for myself.
    I am not going to convince you otherwise, but despite a lot of the AGI is just around the corner is BS, manipulating text and writing better prose than the vast majority of humans are capable of is already here today. Its a bit like saying I like my typewriter because I like the physical sound of the hammers hitting the page compared to modern word processing.

    Same as people saying I write all my own code from scratch because I think I am an top tier coder. Good luck convincing employers with that one. Its the fastest way of not getting the job.
    I am my own employer. I don't need to convince anyone.

    Do you not enjoy exercising your own mind, and expressing what *you* think, on the page?
    In the near future you will lose out to people offering their services more efficiently.

    I can rage against the light in terms of coding, but I would be shooting myself in the foot if I didn't get LLMs to enable me to write significantly more code per day. It gives me lots more time to exercise my mind on what is really important, thinking hard about solving novel problems.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 9,573
    edited August 22
    Leon said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
    Worse, this is happening at universities. Students are using ChatGPT (or Claude or Grok etc) to write essays.... and professors are using ChatGPT to read and mark them

    "An existential crisis’: can universities survive ChatGPT?"


    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/an-existential-crisis-can-universities-survive-chatgpt-7r38r72sv
    For sure, I've seen this. Though they generally forget that AIs are crap at referencing (put together plausible looking but made up papers - not surprising given how they work) and so the fake references are a bit of a tell - and fixing the references means actually reading into the topic and doing the work, or some of it.

    It's also obvious - in my area, masters or PhD supervision - when a student produces a document which way exceeds their ability or, conversely, is bland and the student is insightful (this only happened once - it was better written but had much less interesting content than the student's normal work).

    ETA: Undergrads, with whom you'd have less contact, would easily get away with it though, as long as they check the references!
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 45,057
    edited August 22
    PJH said:

    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    They'd better get used to it

    Where can we find this ChatGPT caper?

    Can you ping me over the What,Three.Words. location please?
    Kids are growing up with these bots and use them incessantly. Universities are being destroyed by them. They will become universal and ubiquitous

    That said, as someone mentioned on the prior thread, there is a definite subset of young people that hate them, and want nothing to do with them

    My older daughter is one. Loathes the whole idea. And no, that's not (solely) because I keep banging on about it, she says some of her friends feel the same and her half sister - my other daughter - in Australia is the same: and I've never brought up the subject once, with her
    ChatGPT is rotting the brains of kids. They are genuinely losing their ability to think and reason properly. Not just kids tbf, loads of adults too. A CTO in one of my previous workplaces is now just a walking, talking LLM prompt response. There's no question too big or too small where he won't use Claude. He was shit at the job anyway but apparently it's now so bad that even the grunts are starting to notice that the AI has taken over his brain.
    I can't spell now and the reason for that is spellchecker. Also due to keyboards my handwriting is illegible. Tech has reduced me to the level of a small child in this respect.
    My ire is reserved for those who now cannot navigate without satnav, even around their own home town. And for those who trust satnav over the bloke in the passenger seat who has lived round here most of his life and made this exact journey numerous times. Particularly if they're in a Tesla.
    So much this. I was particularly irked when I had booked a local cab *in advance* to take me to a Golf Club for a party in the middle of nowhere but not that far from my home. I didn't know exactly where it was so when the driver's satnav stopped at a cross roads and he said "where is it?" I said "I don't know, you're the driver" and left him to drive up and down each road in turn until eventually I got bored and asked at the local pub. There was no signal there (within 20 miles of Central London).

    All I know is, if I'd been a local cab driver I'd have known the venue, and if I was new, I'd have checked where it was on the map before setting off. I don't use a cab often but they don't seem to know how to get between even two well-known locations without satnav any more.
    They all fall over anyway when the council put diversions on which aren't on the system. And then put more diversions in without explaining whcih sign refers to which. A real pain in Dorset at night, in my experience. But I had my OS map with me.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 9,573

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
    I am sure that is true. They are misusing the technology and I am fairly certain in the near future business will be forced to change as plucky start-ups will show how you can do things much more efficiently and with fewer staff.
    To be fair, this kind of process has probably happened a lot in corporates and governments before in less efficient ways - senior writes a few key points and gets junior to flesh it out; receiving senior gets the a different junior to provide a summary of key points. The intriguing thing, in this process or with AI is how similar the source and final key points are!
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 87,034
    edited August 22
    Selebian said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Come on, who else is actually writing all the text in their own emails...I am certainly not. And I bet loads of those polled have used it to do the same.

    If your email is that long no one is reading it and it should be replaced by a shared doc for comments, or a Teams call. The same goes for short ones tbh, those should be Teams messages.

    I only email if it needs to be on the corporate record. I feel quite strongly about this given the countless hours of wading through pointless emails. (Sorry, might be a generational thing).
    Quite the opposite of long emails, I find Claude extremely good at taking prose and forming a highly efficient version of it. I just give it bullets points or a some wad of text that I can't be bothered to summarise and say email in no more than x words.
    I suspect that in large areas of corporate (and government) pen-pusher keyboard-basher land people are feeding bullet points into an AI of choice, emailing the lengthy document produced (showing great work ethic, expertise and value for money) to a client, client then feeds into an AI of choice to extract a bullet point summary.

    I can't help feeling there may be a more efficient alternative to this!
    I am sure that is true. They are misusing the technology and I am fairly certain in the near future business will be forced to change as plucky start-ups will show how you can do things much more efficiently and with fewer staff.
    To be fair, this kind of process has probably happened a lot in corporates and governments before in less efficient ways - senior writes a few key points and gets junior to flesh it out; receiving senior gets the a different junior to provide a summary of key points. The intriguing thing, in this process or with AI is how similar the source and final key points are!
    Bullshit jobs aren't a recent phenomenon or restricted to public sector.

    But I think LLMs will allow challengers to come up fast as they can do a fair bit of the donkey work with far less people and faster.

    I see it in what I do, people are turning around new ideas much faster.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 19,534
    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    I have some sympathy for Mike Reader here. I seen no reason why chatgpt shouldn't be used to help shape words into the right order. It's only like getting an underling to do the drafting.

    I suspect the numbers might not be all that different if you put "assistant" instead of "ChatGPT".

    People want that direct connection to their MP.
    People also want the lives of MPs to be unnecessarily austere. You get a similar response about MPs travelling first class. I suspect that is some of the driver.
    That's got to be a lot of it. How much correspondence does a typical
    MP get these days? A lot more than allows for reading and response by one person, I'm sure.
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