When the thought is "I'd like this person to know how grateful I am", the medium doesn't really matter.

When the thought is "I owe this person a 'Thank You'", the handwritten letter gives an illusion of deeper thought. That's why there are fonts designed to look handwritten. To the receiver, they're just junk mail. I'd rather not get them at all, in any form. I was happy just having done the thing, and the thoughtless response slightly lessens that joy.

You have never received automated spam letters?

Do you think that spam letters are generally considered to be a good use of resources?

No, but it counters this point "a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans."

I don't think it does unless you ignore the context of the conversation. Its very clear that the reference about "letters" being made wasn't "all mail."

Writing personal letters has other dangers as well. Remember how George Costanza's fiancée got killed.

Imagine the process of solving a problem as a sequence of hundreds of little decisions that branch between just two options. There is some probability that your human brain would choose one versus the other.

If you insert AI into your thinking process, it has a bias, for sure. It will helpfully reinforce whatever you tell it you think makes sense, or at least on average it will be interpreted that way because of a wide variety of human cognitive biases even if it hedges. At the least it will respond with ideas that are very... median.

So at each one of these tiny branches you introduce a bias towards the "typical" instead of discovering where your own mind would go. It's fine and conversational but it clearly influences your thought process to, well, mitigate your edges. Maybe it's more "correct", it's certainly less unique.

And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.

> And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.

This, speaking about environmental impacts. I wish that more models start focusing on the parameter density / their compactness more so that they can run locally but this isn't something that big tech really wants so we are probably gonna get models like the recent minimax model or glm air models or qwen or mistral models.

These AI services only work as long as they are free and burn money. As an example, me and my brother were discussing something yesterday related to LLM and my mother tried to understand and talk about it too and wanted to get ghibli styles photo since someone had ghibli generated photo as their pfp and she wanted to try it too

She then generated the pictures and my brother did a quick calculation and it took around 4 cents for each image which with PPP in my country and my currency is 3 ruppees.

When asked by my brother if she would pay for it, she said that no she's only using it for free but she also said that if she were forced to, she might even pay 50 rupees.

I jumped in the conversation and said nobody's gonna force her to make ghibli images.

Articulating thoughts is the backbone of communication. Replacing that with some kind of emotionless groupthink does actually destroy human-to-human communication.

I would wager that the amount of “very significant thing that have happened over the history of humanity” come down to a few emotional responses.

Do you think that the LLM helped deliver a thoughtful letter to Rob Pike?

I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication between people.

Automated systems sending people unsolicited, unwanted emails is more commonly known as spam.

Especially when the spam comes with a notice that it is from an automated system and replies will be automated as well.

Communicate between what though?

Communication happen between two parties. I wouldn't consider LLM an party considering it's just an autosuggestion on steroids at the end of day (lets face it)

Also if you need communication like this, just share the prompt anyway to that other person in the letter, people much rather might value that.