Comment by saghm
10 hours ago
That sounds pretty similar to what I get from LLMs regardless of what they're writing for. Any time I get more than a paragraph out from an LLM, it tends to have of a lot of irrelevant details or unnecessary hedging, and I have to either wade through it to find the actual answer or try to convince it to make it more direct.
As someone on the spectrum, this does happen to me with people sometimes too; I struggle when asking a question and getting an answer that doesn't fit the "shape" of what I expect (e.g. asking a yes or no question and getting a relatively long sentence in response that doesn't contain either "yes" or "no" in it, which means I need to do the equivalent of applying it as a diff to my mental model and seeing if there are conflicts). This happens less frequently with other humans though, and on average the amount of effort I need try to figure out what they're saying is a lot lower. This doesn't make it less frustrating when I get that kind of output from an LLM, but it doesn't surprise me all that much that it happens.
I'm sure I do this all the time to people too, though. One of the biggest lessons I've learned in the past several years is that I communicate in ways that I'd probably have trouble understanding in reverse a lot more frequently than I realized, even I still do the things I find confusing from others less often than most people I interact with. I'm sure a lot of people might find this comment to be pretty much exactly like what I'm complaining about even though I feel fairly confident at least in this moment that my point is clear.
> As someone on the spectrum, this does happen to me with people sometimes too; I struggle when asking a question and getting an answer that doesn't fit the "shape" of what I expect (e.g. asking a yes or no question and getting a relatively long sentence in response that doesn't contain either "yes" or "no" in it, which means I need to do the equivalent of applying it as a diff to my mental model and seeing if there are conflicts). This happens less frequently with other humans though, and on average the amount of effort I need try to figure out what they're saying is a lot lower. This doesn't make it less frustrating when I get that kind of output from an LLM, but it doesn't surprise me all that much that it happens.
I've have people in my life where I've got situation going to the point I got sick of it and just started responding 'That didn't answer my question. Do you remember what my question was?'. Turns out many people seem to invent out of whole cloth what your question is rather than actually responding to it. Seems like a whole lot of wasted effort. I mean, it's one thing to ask a yes or no question and getting 'it depends on X, Y, Z, blah blah blah', or just 'I'm not sure/don't know'. There have been far to many cases where I ask something and the response is functionally 'well you see, it all began in 1969, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth'.
LLMs seem to atleast actually respond to your question. The question might be phrased in a way which doesn't match what you intended, and the answer will be verbose and require you to wade through prose to actually find it, or it might just be wrong, but it will at least be an answer to the question you gave it.
My personal experience is that people who respond to my like this do tend to understand what I've asked but aren't particularly direct in the way they describe things, which both causes them to give answers hard for me to understand and would cause them to probably not do a great job trying to phrase my question in their own words (and very few people are memorizing the conversation so that they can recite parts of it back later on).