AI for Team Communication
We raised the controversial question of whether using AI for team communication is appropriate.
My view is that communication within a team should be in natural language. Agents can then be brought in to implement what was discussed in natural language, steer the discussion as it unfolds, or develop it further, but not replace it.
My opponent thinks otherwise. He considers it acceptable to copy an agent's response and send it under his own name.
As I see it, this is not only disrespectful to the other person. It is roughly in the same category as sending voice messages, based on the principle that "it is more convenient for me, and I do not care that the recipient has to spend five minutes making sense of my mumbling instead of 30 seconds grasping the point." More importantly, it makes the team inefficient.
A team should be built so that people understand each other with very few words. Anyone who has ever spoken with someone who speaks another language knows that using a translator makes communication dramatically worse. It glitches, causes delays, and distorts meaning, sometimes beyond recognition. So if people need a translator to work as a team, their communication is inefficient. This means the team is inefficient and cannot release a competitive product.
This is not even considering that using agents for communication makes it impossible to determine the epistemic status of a statement. Before, if the author did not know something, they said plainly, "I don't know." If the author had doubts, they wrote, "I'm not sure about this." Now, if the author of a message does not know or is unsure, their agent fills out the message with confident-sounding fantasies. The recipient then has to spend time guessing which parts the author genuinely believes and which parts are fantasies.
Of course, this may all be because my opponent configured his agents poorly, which broke the communication. But I suspect that having an intermediary cannot make the process more efficient, regardless of that intermediary's skill.
I am building my product so that people can communicate with each other in clear language, while agents are used for things that can and should actually be automated. Simple human communication should not be automated.