Paolo Valdemarin's blog – since 2002
Once upon a time there was the app Moves, which I used for a few years to track everywhere I was going. From Moves I could export data and generate heat maps of my movements. It was great, but then FB bought Moves, and the app died. Strava offers similar maps, which are not as detailed (I don’t track everything with Strava), but still I find all these maps absolutely fascinating. These are the most beaten paths around my two homes.
In the last couple of weeks I have been involved in multiple recruitment processes and I find fascinating how candidates have been using (presumably) ChatGPT to interact with possible employers.
In one case we are actually recruiting “Prompt engineers”, so it’s somewhat appropriate for them to seek AI help, but the standardisation and verbosity of the language generated is getting a bit annoying.
GPT-4 actually has amazing language capabilities, it can write in any style, any language, any dialect, as long as it is properly prompted or trained. This is not the case for the vast majority of messages we receive, one of the key sentences that I have started to notice is the “I hope this message finds you well” which ChatGPT seems to be using way more than the usual folks I usually exchange messages with.
I have also developed a certain sensibility in finding reused language: when tasked with responding to a “why should we hire you?” type of question, I could often read my own words from the company “About us” page, just slightly reshuffled to answer the question. I could easily reverse engineer the simple prompt used to generate the message.
I’m sure that we will look back at these early steps fondly, soon AIs will be so well integrated in our ecosystems that they will be able to generate language exactly in our style before we will have even started thinking about it.
In the meanwhile I’m considering setting up a filter to delete all email messages starting with “I hope this message finds you well”.
