Comment by ceroxylon
16 hours ago
The voice is one thing, but I have encountered multiple 'tech support' teams and platforms that will respond to me in pure, unedited LLM output.
I know this because the topic is usually an obscure issue, and I have already gone back-and-forth with multiple LLMs to see where their boundary of knowledge is on it, and it will often include hallucinations along the way (e.g. pointing to old/nonexistent settings pathways)
So when the first reply from the official 'support' channel contains the exact same nonexistent settings pathways, it is easy to conclude they are sending me the LLM output without doing the verification steps that I have already done on my end. When I point out what doesn't exist, the reply is always a similar flavor of the usual LLM "you're absolutely right" response after being corrected.
Tangential rant: I find myself getting viciously angry when these support bots lead with, "I'm very sorry to hear that. I understand how [rehashed summary of complaint] would make you feel frustrated." Mother ****er, you don't understand what it means to feel anything.
I'm all for having these bots process inquiries if it means a speedier resolution, but, please, anyone out there using these things, turn off the simulated sympathy. It's infuriating how condescending it comes across.
> getting viciously angry when these support bots lead with, "I'm very sorry to hear that. I understand how [rehashed summary of complaint] would make you feel frustrated."
The bots are specifically trained to do this because lots of people are dumb enough to prefer it that way.
It's something ELIZA could do in the 60s, and that worked unsettlingly well for an unsettling fraction of people who tried it.
I still think LLMs should be banned from using first person pronouns
(yes I understand this is likely not legal or practicable)
The models can predict any conversation, so it probably doesn't matter to them. For us humans it would be much better to let them write in the third person (e.g. "the coding assistant needs to verify XY, it does it by calling `grep -i abc`). It would decrease the anthropomorphism.