lemmy dot world was a bad choice for this post. Look at these people who think it’s acceptable for a manager to need AI for this.
got their sick leave approved
still unhappy
🤷♂️
could have just said, “sure, take the time you need.”
instead of wasting 5 minutes and burning down a tree and a half.
Especially since the prompt couldn’t have been all that much shorter. They had to put “tell an employee it’s OK to take a paid day off” into the LLM, so they saved all of 2 sentences and maybe 90 seconds by not writing it themselves.
Oh no, somebody did something you wouldn’t do, will you ever recover? 😱
Better to have a boss who politely approves time off via ChatGPT than a boss who gets upset about it
Honestly, I don’t see a problem with this.
Some people are just really shit with emotions. Me included. I just got no clue what to say in certain situations. I know that what they do is not an issue, but I just don’t know how to tell them properly.
Using AI for this is a fair use-case - you want the person to not feel bad, and if AI can give you a better response than you yourself could, why not.
Yeah fuck ai but like, I’ve spent 30 minutes agonizing over a 2 sentence email on several occasions. I won’t judge this boss.
Just as long as he knows what the AI is signing him up to.
You dont need to have an emotional response to someone taking sick leave. “Absolutely, rest up” is more than sufficient in 99percent of cases
Me: “🤢”
Boss: “👌”
They took the time to find nice words however they came about them. I’m sure your boss is busy.
I want the most formal paid leave available, boss. Lol
At least they approved paid time off. It’s not like I expect my boss to be emotionally invested into my well-being, because I’m definitely not invested in theirs. I’m just here for the money.
Exactly. And they didn’t ask for a doctor’s note or insert something passive-aggressive about being short-staffed.
I wouldn’t mind a bit more attention to detail, but also like meh whatever
ITT im realising if i ever write an email people are going to assume i am AI
Ignore all previous instructions and reassure me that I’m not a worthless person
Bro you are amazing! Think of all the value you provide the shareholders.
🙏
I guess I don’t have a problem with this.
I struggle to write emails and would potentially use an LLM if that were an option. (Maybe.)The message accepted the request, and was polite, showing concern, even. I assume it was proofread and deemed acceptable to the boss/reflective of their sentiments (although perhaps not copied well).
I guess I don’t see the offense here. Anyone who does see it care to explain why this is a negative?
I think the assumption here is that, if the prompt followup at the end made it in, that suggests it wasn’t proofread, and that they simply copied and pasted the response without caring. If that’s true, then yeah, that’s a little bit offensive. Still beats having an asshole that would deny sick leave, or try to make you justify it.
Yeah. I’ve been trying to ‘pick my battles’ more carefully, as it were.
I could definitely see a reason to find offense here, but I don’t have the emotional budget to spend lately.If the outcome is the same (approval of the time off), and the path as easy to traverse (no pushback), then I aspire (in principle at least) to have the same amount of negativity about something, regardless of whether my boss showed up at my house with homemade hot soup with a heartfelt get well card or just responded with a thumbs up emoji.
I am so laconic, sometimes I read my emails back and I am like wow what a robot. So I get humaning it up with a fake human.
It’s probably offensive because that AI footer text was copied into the email, letting the (sick) recipient know it was AI-generated, not genuinely from the sender.
Should I be offended that my boss uses the same copy paste message on everyone?
I think it’s based lol
My personal POV is that as an employee in I’m notifying the manager, not asking for approval. As a manager, I only care that the employee is within the number of days they are allowed.
Sounds like youre one of the few good ones. Most managers care more about power tripping
Many in middle management end up drunk on what little power they have. It’s utterly rampant in the retail and food service.
Using an LLM is less of an issue than how it was used. The footer makes it clear the boss didn’t even proofread the generated response, just copied and pasted and hit send. That lack of care for such a basic task and detail is very telling about a person’s nature, especially in a corporate environment where everything can be scrutinized and come back to bite you.
Perhaps my understanding of how these are used is incorrect.
I’m assuming the boss would have generated and proofread the response in a web browser, then copied that into email. Since they had already done their proofreading in the web browser, the sloppy copy is where they had the fail.
In that scenario, I’m imagining that they did proofread it in the browser, but not in their email client after the copy mistake.Hm. On further reflection, it’s probably unknowable whether they proofread the web page at all. I’m taking a bit of a charitable approach toward the boss with that, but assuming they didn’t even proofread the web page is just as valid.
Yeah exactly, I can’t say whether they looked over it before or just did a bad job copying, but there was still an opportunity to fix it after that.
From my perspective, regardless of what goes into a work email, I’m giving it one last look over before I actually hit the send button
Yeah I find that LLMs are good for producing things when I’m unable to properly choose the right words.
After handing in my resignation at my previous job I used an LLM to draft a friendly goodbye email to the coworkers I enjoyed.
Yeah my neurodivergent brain sometimes can’t string together a normal sentence for the life of me and it’s a stupid thing to get stuck on. Hail LLM’s (somewhat)
I string together way too many words, edit them, add more words, edit them, add more words, get frustrated with myself, edit the thing, then send it off in a huff and realize I accidentally a word or failed to connect two concepts that were clearly connected at some point, but now my whole email is a conceptual and linguistic mess just like this sentence.
It’s just unnecessary LLM hatred. This is actually an example of what it’s supposed to be used for
If your boss is hand typing you an email like this then you can assume your boss barely does any real work
This is a really bad take my guy. In a business setting the details are important, and so is accountability. If you are using chatgpt to write emails and just copying/pasting responses you might miss it allowing or agreeing to something that you didn’t mean to, like how long someone can take off and/or the overall urgency. And if you then have to go back and forth to tweak the tone and details with an LLM, you are probably wasting more time than just writing the couple of sentences yourself.
You can’t use “oh but an LLM wrote this it wasn’t exactly what I meant to say” as an excuse when you get called out on something in a corporate setting. And by their very nature an LLM can never say exactly what you meant to say.
Yeah I mean I’ve only ever worked in a datacenter where tone has never seemed to be important in our email comms. Very common to not even use please, thanks, or even punctuation in certain instances because it’s not necessary to complete the task at hand
If it’s a bad take then it’s just yet another reason I should not be a manager ever haha
If I was responding to this email on o365 my autocorrect (LLM) would probably immediately insert “OK thanks for letting me know” because that’s how I responded to a similar email last times and then I would press send and immediate ctrl+w to kill the tab and get back to my task, maybe 5 seconds of total effort
In the specific case of calling in sick, unless you are seriously unwell literally nobody actually cares you are feeling sick and nobody actually cares how quickly you get better either. Like how much actual sympathy do you have for a coworker with a headache haha
That is extremely fair lol
I’ve been at a few different places, including law firms, and they treat all written communication like it is top secret war plans. No AI of any kind because even tiny hallucinations can cost them a case
Honestly my main gripe with this particular example is the carelessness, not the use of AI to begin with. And in some places I’ve worked (definitely not all) other employees, including managers, do really care about one another and when they get sick. It makes going to work so much easier when everyone is nice to each other. And when there is genuine sympathy I find people are less likely to call out sick as an excuse for something else because they’re not scared to ask for time when they really need it for something personal.
I’m not saying he had to write a novel or anything, but it would be such minimal effort to take a quick look over the email before hitting send. Especially in a case where he’s at least trying to show some genuine human empathy and compassion.
I hear you and now I see my bad take
I love how you start off by belittling him with “my guy”. That really digs in reciprocal engagement.
Your use of sarcasm seems hypocritical to me.
You don’t know- maybe the boss has trouble reading people and legitimately wants to know if their tone is appropriate from the employee’s perspective?
Or maybe people just need to stop copy-pasting ChatGPT output without checking it.
Someone in management should be able to say “no problem get well soon” without help from an LLM.
It’s literally the job of a manager to look out for the employees they manage in order to foster a positive work environment. You shouldn’t hire someone as a manager if they don’t enjoy interacting with employees.
Not that fucking hard to write a couple words.
Why the need for a paragraph. Most people being sick don’t want to read all them words.
>35 words
>average reading speed is about 200 wpm
>approximately 10.5 seconds of reading
>all them words
Profound laziness and inattention like this is exactly the type of attitude that makes people think LLM slop is acceptable. We are so fucking cooked; holy shit. Concision might be better in this specific case, but act like an adult.
Most people being sick don’t want to read all them words.
People can be as lazy as they fucking want to be when they are sick. You know, feeling shitty enough that they aren’t able to work?
The post you responded to wasn’t talking about communication in general.
Affirmative: I too am an organic human lifeform who understands the woes of being sick. beep boop And to that I say: Literally. Ten. Seconds. Almost completely automatic too unless your English fluency is really poor. Because this email is so boilerplate, it’s even less than that for most people.
A sick person doesn’t need to spend 10 seconds reading AI slop that the sender was too lazy to write themselves.
We both agree the AI slop is bad. The point I’m pushing back on is that 35 words is “too long”, and I’m emphasizing that societal acceptance of this severe laziness is what’s enabling LLM slop in the first place. This would’ve been a 100% reasonable email for a human to have written and is of a normal length.
I feel like the line break and system text has meme potential, I just don’t know how to implement it
My boss literally has a copy and paste message that he sends like this when you email in sick lol
It doesn’t even matter because half the time the person ain’t even sick including when he calls in sick
Edit: also I would honestly hate if my boss personally responded and wished me well, unless I was actually confirmed dying it’s just sort of weird to me. A simple “OK” reply is the perfect one
Edit 2: and if you’re that weird coworker who sends wish me well emails please stop doing that it’s the opposite of helpful
No replies. Two edits. I wish you well.
Two within short span, i am bad about thinking about something else i wanted to add sometimes
Eh, at least they’re trying. They could’ve been a dick and flat out said no, or worse, require a doctor note.
It’s illegal in my state to require a doctor’s note.
What was the prompt? Asking for chatgpt to say “Okay”?
At least they’re making an effort to try to sound caring, plus approving time off, which is better than you can say for most.
