By I DON’T KNOW IF this is a personal quirk or if others have this happen, but I bump into all sorts of odd and/or amusing content as I look for things to share on this blog.
Most of the time, I couldn’t tell you how I found this kind of stuff, but here’s a good example of something interesting and amusing that I found recently. It’s from a blog called Letters of Note and written by a guy named Shaun Usher.
He launched Letters of Note back in 2009 and says of it:
“The Letters of Note website has been visited over 100 million times. In 2013, the first Letters of Note book was published to wide acclaim and became a bestseller. As of 2021, there are 14 volumes in the Letters of Note series.”
What the website is about is simple: “The Letters of Note newsletter is about letters. Interesting ones. That’s it, in a nutshell.”
“Mind-blowing and only faintly worrying”
What caught my attention was a recent blog post that was titled Yours Robotically – 500 ways to end a letter, according to our AI overlords.
Shaun Usher describes it like this:
“I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, which, for the uninitiated, is an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that’s been fed huge amounts of data from a variety of sources and is now open for questioning. That’s about as much complexity as my poor brain can handle, so thankfully the upshot is simple: you type a question about pretty much anything, and it quickly gives you an answer in human-like language. I’ve described it terribly but trust me when I say it’s mind-blowing and only faintly worrying.
Very quickly, because I’m a nerd with a one-track mind, I began to ask questions related to letters, and after an initial period of disappointment I told it to come up with some unique ways to end a letter or email.”
Usher’s bigger goal was to develop more creative ways to sign off a letter or email, and ChatGPT seemed like the perfect way to do that:
“I’m interested in valediction at the end of letters and emails, e.g.“Best wishes, Shaun,” “Kind regards, Shaun” and “Yours sincerely, Shaun.” I want you to devise some new ones. They must be unique but not so ridiculous that I wouldn’t be able to sign off a letter or email with them. They can be of any length. Humour is allowed but not necessary. Give me 50 signoffs for each of the following types of letters.”
What follows are 500 signoffs that are AI created with ChatGPT. He says that “not all of them are good; some, in fact, are terrible. But many are genuinely great and useful, and quite a few are very funny.”
Yes, ChatGPT sometimes makes things up
Want a few examples? Here are 10 that grabbed my attention:
- Yours in adventure, Shaun
- Optimistically yours, Shaun
- From my keyboard to yours, Shaun
- Until we type again, Shaun
- Yours from afar, Shaun
- With admiration and awe, Shaun
- With pride and pleasure, Shaun
- In the spirit of forgiveness, Shaun
- With newfound understanding, Shaun
- With the warmth of reconciliation, Shaun
I pulled these from three categories: positive, apologetic, and celebratory. There are seven other categories, each with 50 AI –generated signoffs: angry, romantic (as in Eternally Smitten, Shaun), hot, job seeking, holidaying, corporate, and reconciliatory.
Is this a good use of AI and ChatGPT? I suppose it is, although Shaun Usher adds this cautionary footnote:
“Don’t ask ChatGPT about a specific letter from history. It will simply lie and make one up, breezily quoting from a supposedly genuine piece of correspondence that sounds fascinating but turns out to be a hallucination. It’s cruel, it’s a tease, and I refuse to be duped again.”
My favorite signoffs? That’s hard to say, although the Hot category is full of ones that I can’t imagine anyone ever using – things like “Yearning for your taste, Shaun.”
If that’s what our AI overlords have in mind for us, well, you might as well shoot me now …
Respectfully at your service,
John
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