- Deans are paid a lot. Our dean make a quarter mil.
- Mass shooting emails should _probably_ have a human touch.
- Heck, any human tragedy email should _probably_ have a human touch.
- Does the university want to pay the Dean to write emails?
- Does the Dean want to write emails?
- What is the Dean doing for a quarter mil a year?
- Probably playing around with ChatGPT?
- For a quarter mil a year, could we not hire a bunch of grads to study GPTs?
No, I am just not sure how I feel about a GPT writing an email for a Dean about a mass shooting.
Haha, this is why sometimes people don't really like "five whys" - you can get to an uncomfortable place pretty quickly...
Q1. Why was the service down for so long?
A1: Because the on-call engineer didn't respond to the pager
Q2: Why didn't the on-call engineer respond?
A2: Because they're exhausted from being on-call so often since the team was downsized
Q3: Why was the team downsized?
A3: Because the manager's manager's manager is reducing headcount this year?
Q4: Why is the manager's manager's manager reducing headcount?
A4: Because they're trying to bring the departments spend down for the year
Q5: Why are they trying to bring the spend down?
A5: Because they know their boss, the CTO, is interviewing at the moment. And the CFO is golf buddies with the CEO, and the CFO is always going on about improving efficiency. So if the manager's manager's manager can reduce spend this year it'll look really efficient to the CFO, and maybe they can line-up that CTO role when their boss leaves.
The article referred to the duo as the deans who "signed off" on the letter (paraphrasing). I wonder of the actual author(s) in the comms department also got suspended for automating the one thing they are paid to do.
I think you're implicitly assuming (1) the email must be written and (2) it doesn't matter what the email actually contains, who writes it, or if it's good or bad. Might get some mileage out of examining those.
It's not THE Dean, it's some deans – Vanderbilt seems to have many deans, and these were (minor) deans of the office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
If you’re just wondering how students knew that the email was written using ChatGPT, the last line of the email weirdly reads “Paraphrase from OpenAI's ChatGPT AI language model, personal communication, February 15, 2023”.
That's the only thing they did wrong. Why mention you used ChatGPT? It's like emails that end with "sent from my iPhone" like who cares what technology you used to send an email?
With “sent from my iPhone” it’s an excuse for brevity and/or typos. Consider that the iPhone’s keyboard was a downgrade from the Blackberry that was previously standard among business users. The automatically-appended disclaimer saves the sender a bit of stress.
Personally I think it was motivated by trying to create a marketed feeling of exclusivity , drive a stake between Those With and Those Without, and alienate those without into buying an iProduct and joining The Club.
Regardless of the reason, I think less of anyone who doesn't turn it off. Made me cringe so badly when I sent an email from a new email client that added something similar and I hadn't checked the signature.
One reason I feel that way is that the only time I'd see it in a work context is if it's a phishing email.
Even though I could change it, I never bothered to remove the default signature. It works pretty well as a disclaimer because most people don’t bother to remove it. Therefore, you’re able to signal you’re not replying in an optimal manner without the other person feeling slighted.
“Hey, I’m sending this email from my phone” is pretty much a necessity when dealing with clients and such.
I’m grateful the default Mail sig works as a graceful catch-all rather than fitting in an awkward mea culpa in the body or (worse) slapping in some boilerplate sig that might as well read “this email is unreliable and so am I” to certain types of people.
My theory is that the person responsible for publishing the email disagreed with using the chatbot, and included the attribution statement in a form of malicious compliance.
I understood it differently. Saying the email is a “paraphrase from ChatGPT” seems more like they had ChatGPT generate it, and then modified or “paraphrased” it themselves
Models that recognize chatgpt also seem to pick it up easily though [0]. Adding it in the email is quite weird though. Or maybe they agreed that is was fine to do so (generating this email by an AI), which is indeed tonedeaf.
University administration is a kafkaesque environment where enthusiastic compliance with a ruleset is of foremost importance. In this context, citing a source is covering your ass. If anyone has a problem with the wording, it’s GPT’s fault. It probably never occurred to them that citing the source could get you into trouble.
ChatGPT doesn’t insert itself as a citation, it was added deliberately. For what reason is the question…I don’t say I use spellcheck when I write something with Word.
To their credit, they attributed the assistance by the chatbot. (I don't think they carelessly copy pasted and did not notice the chatGPT notice).
Of course, humans expect honest and sincere communication in times of grief and not automated responses, so that's on the Deans for making poor decisions (just as poor as it would be to hire a PR firm to compose something for them --it probably happens but just does not get announced)
"Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about." -- Agent Smith, 1999
This feels like a very smart and deliberate protest on performativity of these messages. Besides the credit to chatgpt it is completely believable. Like even the computer can do it, I hope this inspires people. It made me cry
I don’t see how creating a prompt that includes all the main things you want to say is different than writing the whole essay yourself. Seems like about the same amount of time would have been put into each.
I can’t think of a context where I would be upset about receiving a letter written by AI from uni administration/company/government, but I also use tools like CharGPT to help me communicate myself.
There is a widespread cultural assumption that important messages should be delivered as personally as reasonably possible. People think that it shows proper respect and that the matter is important to you. In contrast, if you choose a more impersonal way of delivery, it signals that the topic is not particularly important to you as a person.
Many people already think that emails like this are performative bullshit. If it's actual bullshit written by a bullshit generator, it's going to look even worse.
"Samuel Lu, a sophomore, told the student paper: 'It’s hard to take a message seriously when I know that the sender didn’t even take the time to put their genuine thoughts and feelings into word. In times of tragedies such as this, we need more, not less humanity.' "
Or maybe they shouldn’t insert the “citation” that they used ChatGPT to help edit their correspondence. Ignorance is bliss. This story is a huge nothingburger and the Dean did nothing wrong.
1. Is it possible that some tool was used which caused the 'citation' at the end was not visible to the person who sent the email? It appears to be an automatically generated thing. It would be much stranger if someone typed it out like that intentionally.
2. Much more cynically, there is otherwise nothing controversial about the email. Clearly ChatGPT is suitable for writing non-controversial platitudes like this. This news story is guerilla marketing targeted at lazy college deans.
But I was under the impression that ChatGPT would help people be more kind and compassionate in their correspondence if they struggled with that before?
Wouldn’t someone start by creating some basic points about what they want to express and then edit the response?
Isn’t ChatGPT supposed to be a “jumping off point” for these kinds of thing?
Are people mad because the author was transparent about their use of editing tool? Should the Dean have been less transparent? I don’t put in my correspondence that I use spelling and grammar checks in Word, so why would you say you used ChatGPT?
Public comms are always a charade. In fact I’d go so far as to say I think communication in general is just a game where you try to say the right thing and create the right impression. Expecting “genuine feeling” from other people, much less from a public statement, is a big misunderstanding of how social interaction works.
The dean who wrote this message doesn’t care about the students. She doesn’t know them. She’s fulfilling a role where she acts as a figurehead that students can project feelings of compassion onto. Like any other job, this one also involves some degree of drudgery, such as writing emails like this. It’s good that ChatGPT can make her life easier by automating that task. Her actual fault was accidentally admitting to it and ruining her image as a figurehead, which is her actual job. But if you’re looking for a referendum on the dangers of ChatGPT on society or something, this story isn’t it.
This episode is a great learning experience for the student body and the faculty.
When I receive a communication from a senior official, my expectations are as follows:
1) the communication was probably written by someone else
2) the contents of the communication were reviewed and approved by the senior official
If either of the associate deans (or a responsible intermediary, on behalf of the associate deans) had reviewed the communication, they would have made a note to remove the mention of ChatGPT. The outrage is completely justified, yet the communication itself would have been acceptable, if a human had written it.
We should let this moment of outrage pass. Whether the junior person is prompting an AI model or copy-pasting the best bits from previous communications, the senior person's role remains unchanged.
I can understand why someone would think it's ok to use this tool, and I can understand why some people are upset by it. I hope that they will take a lenient approach in this case considering that the norms in this space haven't been firmly established yet, even if we ultimately decide that going forward communication of this magnitude has to be handwritten.
I'm very confused by how this occurred. Did the school implement a policy that it's okay to send out AI generated emails so long as the use of AI is disclosed? Did the sender not proofread the email and notice that it mentioned ChatGPT at the bottom? What other emails are being sent out without a human so much as bothering to look at them?
In case parent comment context is not clear, since it is UK-specific: the Daily Mail has a bit of a reputation in the Uk among some for being low quality and inflammatory.
