> “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”

I’m not saying there’s no merit in adding a bit of politeness and professionalism to your communication, which I’m sure the prompt itself lacks. However the root of what you’re trying to convey is the prompt, wrap that in a header and a signature. Not only are we talking as humans, we’re also communicating directly.

Also I just find it a little insulting if someone sends me an AI response. I don’t know why, maybe because it feels not genuine.

Hard, isn’t it? The highest ideals are.

The clankers are just very big machine spirits. Treat them as such.

But while reading this article, something clicked, it makes so much sense. It really made me feel better.

"In brief: Can you bring a dozen brownies to the noon lunch tomorrow?

Details: Dessert plans fell through. Your brownies are the best, and you owe me..."

This structure is liberating for me. I can distill what I want/need into something brief and even brusque, knowing that people will read on if the need justification. It also makes me clarify what I want. Probably not appropriate if I'm too far down the totem pole from the addressee.

You can’t. CEOs will physically recoil from it. Probably leftovers from being a human some day. For them you’re “lower value human capital”, cattle, numbers on a sheet.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/standard-chartered-ceo-bill-w...

But almost all output outside that space is at risk of AI displacement. Corporations are amoral entities that optimize for profit, and they follow the law only as much as they must.

The law is our collective action. We socially construct what we value. We could fight to preserve the 5-day work week doing what machines can do. But.. I’d rather fight for collective ownership of the machines.

Nope, it very much is conditional to it, as it's conditional to utility.

The OP is not going to come an pay someone who can't get a job and has zero market value due to AI.

So this "a human is (intristically) valuable" is just a meaningless pat on the back, while the human is devalued.

Talking to machines is only ever something I have to do so that I can put food on the table. I never remember the minutes that I have spent talking to a machine, they are not memorable because they are not valuable.

In my personal life I use AI a lot for information discovery and high level discussion of the problem space. I use it occasionally to write some prototype code to get started on something. It makes a great debugging and problem solving tool, though I typically find that I need to have an idea of what the problem is to steer it in the right direction. It makes a poor intuition generator, but a great intuition checker and can run with an idea for much faster iteration. I use it essentially zero in my day job as an civil engineer though.

I would essentially NEVER use it to write an email. By the time I’ve specified what it is I’m trying to say, I’ve basically said it. Wordsmithing beyond that usually has almost zero value. Same frankly with writing engineering reports. By the time I’ve told it what it needs to say, I’ve basically written that section. In general, I feel like LLMs are just bad writing tools… In writing I typically find that if I can farm it out to have an LLM write something, then it frankly probably just didn’t need to be said.

I still don't agree with this, because even the best engineers are producing poor output from AI, unless they spend a reasonable amount of time refactoring and cleaning up the output.

To expect a non-engineer to have the same wisdom to architect and structure their output in a sustainable way that will stand the test of time (and inevitable future changes), they're just fooling themselves.

For anyone who's been using LLMs long enough for development, we all know how sloppy the output is unless you have a mountain of formatting and organizational rules in place, and even then, it's anyone guess how well LLMs can actually follow them as a project scales.

Yes, value the human first, but there are strong reasons we've always emphasized mature patterns and idioms in codebases that help them remain maintainable so they can scale and transform with as little friction as possible, and without reaching a point where nobody has the stomach to keep working on it.

Just because we can try to have AI unwind the hairy mess, doesn't mean it's any easier for AI to navigate it than we do. It's a liability that the AI mistakes one naming conflict for another, when the context rot hits the fan — and after months of tossing unreviewed PRs over the finish line without a single thought, it's only a matter of time before your non-engineers are the worst offenders for introducing bugs and eroding the quality.

It doesn't matter how good the models appear to get (it truly is a facade), without judgment and wisdom, they still don't produce nearly the same quality as an experienced engineer, unless they're heavily steered.

Do they catch more potential bugs and edge cases than a human might? Definitely, but it's going to vomit its solutions in all the weirdest places doing it, and now suddenly you've got a 100k LOC pull request to (not) read.

All I can say is, good luck!

He made a distinction between intrinsic value and extrinsic value. Plankton is not as complex of a lifeform as whales, yet whales cannot live without plankton. One has more intrinsic value and the other has more extrinsic value. There is an interrelationship that does not have to flatten value for everything and everyone.

LLMs are trained from the language corpus of our collective consciousness. It reflects our collective, all the wonderful, beautiful, and horrific things we can dream of and put into words.

I love the post. I feel generating AI content is like doing informational compression (weirdly enough, by bloating up the size).

When giving it a prompt, the "normalized AI brain" guesses the intent based on what's the most plausible. All the diverse human brains get filtered, bucketed, here you go, this is the "standard artifact".

And yes, it is a compression because real life is not one shot prompt. If I get an unclear message from my colleague, I ask for clarification. If the message is bloated by AI and some information is added, it already scraped some of the real intent by bucketizing it. Sometimes it may be what the original author meant. Sometimes not.

I don't know what is anyone's motivation in compressing the facts by making text longer and harder to read. This whole.email generation idea is bizarre.

As if that's hard. Here's the gut check: "Individual humans are inherently more valuable than corporations."

a. Decouple the value of human life from economic output.

b. Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.

You can just say it: the problem with AI is a people problem. AI is an amplifier. It allows deceptive people to be more deceptive. Greedy people to be more spammerific. The reckless to less constrained. Exposes more people to the criminally minded, etc. But hopefully there is enough good out there that gets amplified and overcomes the bad. Maybe everyone is valuable in some sense, but surely there are people that you wish could be valuable somewhere far away from your loved ones? We're in a losing battle with entropy. Life and beauty and love need active protection and maintenance. Everything will be of equal value with the heat death of the universe.

To add - I think attention is the scarce resource on both ends. Was this creation important enough to give it my full attention (i.e. do it my self). Is this creation important enough for the user to use / consume (i.e without an agent interacting with it on our behalf or summarising)

I think that horrifies people.

I'm excited for when Github starts letting me check in the chain-of-thought that produced a line of code, and git blame it like I can with commits.

But, I'll take one point in their article a step further you can just say "Humans are invaluable." instead.

I don't like defining humans in terms of valuable at all. Maybe because I feel like that word is very concrete and measured and to actually judge that on any one person requires perspective and capabilities none of us existing or have ever existed possess.

The complexity of the sum total of a human life is so great that I think its folly to try measure the value at all. Those who have tried are often reflected in history as the worst among us.

Sharing the prompts would have messed it all up for sure.

There are other instances where I have shared fairly direct, but not what I would consider rude or aggressive emails to people and had them freak out and I have no idea why, rewriting with LLMs to make them blander but convey the same message is very handy here.

But people don’t want to sound foolish; they want to pretend they can taste the difference. Point to minutiae, study up on distinguishing.

There's an obligatory xkcd about this: https://xkcd.com/1301/

- Human Value

- Sincerity

- Evolution of technology and social systems with them

Do all humans have value? Yes, but not all humans can realize their own value. Your society is the gymnasium that helps you realize your value.

Think of how technology interfaces with humans and their employment. The more efficient technology gets the less people you need to produce the same amount of goods. And with each technological breakthrough production needs less people to operate. Sure, they may redistribute later, but immediately it manifests as layoffs.

Unemployment means less people can self-realize since work IS part of the realization of individuals. If work were not part of your realization, then how else do you buy a house, experience the world, raise kids, etc, if not through your benefits of your work?

Here we see how human value is tied directly to the ability to provide to society and to provide for themselves and we also see how that is tied to the ability of society to employ.

Now I ask you, will the AI crisis (and how it relates to human value) be solved with a CEO at a board meeting showing that humans have intrinsic value?

Or will it be solved with the one sided truth that us workers possess and only we can espouse? This truth being that our value as humans can only come from our self-realization within and as-part of society.

Can that CEO be sincere about how society works or must he adopt a convenient POV?

Capitalist ideology cannot conceive of society as an interconnected whole. A capitalist frame of thinking cannot be sincere, since its actions are in opposition to the interests of the majority. And I am not saying that the production of goods is in opposition, I am referring to HOW the goods are produced is in opposition.

People will only use AI for the things they must already be insincere for, such as work-related communication, because truth is already relinquished in those environments. Work is just money making (usually for someone else) with some niceties sprinkled around and individualism to seal it all up. Faking sincerity is hard and being sincere gets you fired.

Is the problem our recognition of human value or for-profit production as a whole?

Is the problem AI or how hard we have to bullshit each other to get by?

Cue that "I, Robot" meme about if a machine can make a symphony. Maybe AI is making it even easier, but intentless form is already everywhere without AI, if you look. Ever seen an Uwe Boll film?

I mean, this is just begging the question. Many people disagree with this and disagree with the notion that humans are innately valuable. The blog post just seems like a lot of copium from somebody who really hopes he’s right.

Citing Genesis and an Encyclical might strengthen one’s argument for a particular demographic, but for many it will simply be unconvincing.

Like citation sources, no doubt some humans are valuable but whether they are or not is often relative.

For what, and to whom?

This is a very anthropo-centric and hubristic view, in my opinion.

I dont think a human life inherently has any more value than anything else that possesses phenomenal consciousness

This of course makes me somewhat of a hypocrite as I eat meat, but you make some tradeoffs in moral resolve in the name of pragmatism and economy.