Comment by brailsafe
2 days ago
Would you hang out with a friend over coffee or something who, rather than conversing with you, recorded your side of the conversation directly into an LLM and then played you back the result? Seems like a good way to kill a relationship.
A significant part of my friends and family conversations already involve referencing LLMs for scoping, explanations, deeper dives, insights etc. And it's not just me, they use LLMs more than I do. It helps move discussions along. Where before conversation would get bogged down in disputes, now we cover more ground.
If it helps, my friends and family tend to have at least a master's, and the majority have PhDs.
> Would you hang out with a friend over coffee or something who, rather than conversing with you, recorded your side of the conversation directly into an LLM and then played you back the result?
I think the difference is that you're imagining the LLM replaces the conversationalist, but as I said above, my lived experience is that the LLM provides grounding to the discussion, effectively having replaced internet search as a better, faster, broader, smarter library. It doesn't kill the conversation, it makes it better.
> If it helps, my friends and family tend to have at least a master's, and the majority have PhDs.
Those aren't super rare these days, I don't know why arbitrary credentials would matter for this purpose, but incidentally, the notion that they would matter in conversation at all kind of speaks to the type of engagement you might be having with them, which may indeed be different than what I care about.
Personally I don't find people all that engaging the more inclined they are to go looking up answers, to me it represents a certain amount of discomfort with uncertainty, ego, that are necessary for a fun conversation. If someone has an answer because of their experience, great, otherwise it's ok to not know in the moment and continue on.
In one case, I had a friendship kind of fizzle out because we'd be hanging and I'd express some curiosity that I'd hope he'd build on with his own experience or his own sense of wonder, but because he only cared about authoritative facts, he'd google the answer and get frustrated that I only cared about his opinion on what the answer might be. The actual fact was incidental, and this conflict regularly led to impasse where I'd clarify I don't care what the internet says etc.. and I'm fine with that because he wasn't really interested in thought exercises.
A concrete hypothetical mundane example might be posing "How do you think the Iran war might impact gas prices here?" and they'd just look up the history and trends, and then kind of stop there. Dull, I want a human response, speculate and build on it, let yourself be wrong.
> Those aren't super rare these days, I don't know why arbitrary credentials would matter for this purpose
It's an indicator that that demographic isn't opposed to using AI as a conversational tool and find it useful for that purpose - an instant, "smarter" library, if you will.
> The actual fact was incidental, and this conflict regularly led to impasse where I'd clarify I don't care what the internet says etc.. and I'm fine with that because he wasn't really interested in thought exercises.
Thought exercises are better, imho, when they're grounded in facts. Why wouldn't you care what the facts are? Can one have the same level of discourse about space with someone who isn't aware that the Earth is round and thinks it is flat?
> A concrete hypothetical mundane example might be posing "How do you think the Iran war might impact gas prices here?" and they'd just look up the history and trends, and then kind of stop there. Dull, I want a human response, speculate and build on it, let yourself be wrong.
Color me confused. Are you looking for a panic or doomsday response or? What does "human response" even mean? A human looked at the history and trends, that's that human's response to the question!
Looking up the history and trends, and building on those facts could be a deeper dive into the wonders of economics, an exploration of the interconnected-ness and dependence of the various parts of the economy on oil and gas (fertilizer, plastics, and their downstream industries), where the fractionating plants are, where they get their raw materials from, how tied into futures contracts those are, who's got long-term contracts insulating them from the impact, what's that % of folks insulated for 3 months, 6 months, 12 months etc. etc.
I have to say, asking me to speculate and build on a topic that I know nothing about would invite a 'lookup' response from me as well; that's just (imho) a critical thinker style. Once the lookup is done, as a questioner, may I suggest asking probing questions to move the conversation forward - that's what I do.
Just out of curiosity, are you a D&D player, or a Fantasy or adjacent creative? I'm wondering what sort of nature would want to elicit an ungrounded speculative response, and I can imagine an enjoyer or creator of fantasy looking for a creative, speculative, thought exercise with a real world question as a starting point.