The whole article is about AI being bullied into actually being direct

Yeah, the examples in the article are terrible. I can be direct when talking to my boss. "My kid is sick, I'm taking the day off" is entirely sufficient.

But it's handy when the recipient is less familiar. When I'm writing to my kid's school's principal about some issue, I can't really say, "Susan's lunch money got stolen. Please address it." There has to be more. And it can be hard knowing what that needs to be, especially for a non-native speaker. LLMs tend to take it too far in the other direction, but you can get it to tone it down, or just take the pieces that you like.

>When I'm writing to my kid's school's principal about some issue, I can't really say, "Susan's lunch money got stolen. Please address it." There has to be more.

Why?

I mean this sincerely. Why is the message you quoted not enough?

Manners. It's just rude if I'm not somewhat close to the person.

I see. It's impolite to be direct? But it's polite to be flowery and avoid what you're actually trying to say?

I don't always _feel_ autistic, but stuff like this reminds me that I'm not normal.

I hear you. I get it enough to know it’s needed, but actually doing it can be hard. LLMs can be nice for that.

Being too flowery and indirect is annoying but not impolite. If you overdo it then people may still get annoyed with you, but for different reasons. For most situations you don’t need too much, a salutation and a “I hope you’re doing well” and a brief mention of who you are and what you’re writing about can suffice.

There’s an argument that being intentionally annoying is impolite.

It's that consideration that seems to be the problem.

Oh come on it takes longer to work out how to prompt it to say it how you want it then check the output than it does to write a short email already.

And we’re talking micro optimisation here.

I mean I’ve sent 23 emails this year. Yeah that’s it.