Comment by righthand
8 hours ago
It’s entirely useful discussion because as soon as you forget that it’s not really having a conversation with you, it’s a deep dive into delusion that you’re talking to a smart robot and ignoring the fact that these smart robots were trained on a pile of mostly garbage. When I have a conversation with another human, I’m not expecting them to brute force an answer to the topic. As soon as you forget that Llms are just brute forcing token by token then people start living in fantasy land. The whole “it’s not a stochastic parrot” is just “you’re holding it wrong”.
Its not that LLMs are stochastic parrots and humans are not. Its that many humans often sail through conversations stochastic parroting because they're mentally tired and "phoning it in" - so there are times when talking to the LLM, which has a higher level of knowledge, feels more fruitful on a topic than talking to a human who doesn't have the bandwidth to give you their full attention, and also lack the depth and breadth of knowledge. I can go deep on many topics with LLMs that most humans can't or won't keep up on. In the end, I'm really only talking to myself most of the time in either case, but the LLM is a more capable echo, and it doesn't tire of talking about any topic - it can dive deep into complex details, and catching its hallucinations is an exercise in itself.