While I haven't experienced LLMs correcting most (or any) of the problems listed fully and consistently, I do agree that consistent use of LLMs and dealing with their frustrations has worn my patience for conversations with people who exhibit the same issues when talking.
It's kind of depressing. I just want the LLM to be a bot that responds to what I say with a useful response. However, for some reason, both Gemini and ChatGPT tend to argue with me so heavily and inject their own weird stupid ideas on things making it even more grating to interact with them which chews away at my normal interpersonal patience which, as someone on the spectrum, was already limited.
An absolute enjoyable read. It also raises a good point, regarding the Turing test. I have a family member who teaches adults and as she pointed out: You won't believe how stupid some people are.
As critical as I might be of LLMs, I fear that they already outpaced a good portion of the population "intellectually". There's a lower level, which modern LLMs won't cross, in terms of lack of general knowledge or outright stupidity.
We may have reached a point where we can tell that we're talking to a human, because there's no way a computer would lack such basic knowledge or display similar levels of helplessness.
Even some of the things that people think are just broken in LLMs are common in children, e.g. repeating things (getting stuck in a loop) or their inability to understand humour.
Tangentially related, but I enjoyed reading "The Most Human Human" by Brian Christian - granted it's written in a pre-LLM world, it's still very much relevant.
The book is following the annual Turing Test competition, in which, humans are chatting with AIs or real humans without knowing which is which and give them a score out of 10 for being most human and the AI that is "the most human" wins the competition. The twist is, not all humans get 10/10 for being human either - so the human that's the most human also wins a prize.
Is it too late to call it confabulation rather than hallucination? Its such a more appropriate term for both LLM "hallucinations" with an entire scientific literature on it in humans.
“In fact, so rare it is to find someone who knows what I mean that it feels like a magic moment.”
There, lack of interest from the person you talking to or you when listening. It’s because you have different interests. This is a human feature not a flaw. But it’s interesting to think that LLMs might have similar behavior :-)
“I’ll never again ask a human to write a computer program shorter than about a thousand lines, since an LLM will do it better.”
From my personal experience with ChatGPT it can’t even correctly write few lines of code. But i don’t use AI often. I just don’t find it that useful. From what i see it’s mostly a hype bubble that will burst.
But this is my personal opinion and my own observation. I could be wrong :-)
The best thing about a good deep conversation is when the other person gets you: you explain a complicated situation you find yourself in, and find some resonance in their replies. That, at least, is what happens when chatting with the recent large models. But when subjecting the limited human mind to the same prompt—a rather long one—again and again the information in the prompt somehow gets lost, their focus drifts away, and you have to repeat crucial facts. In such a case, my gut reaction is to see if there’s a way to pay to upgrade to a bigger model, only to remember that there’s no upgrading of the human brain.
Paying for someone to put some effort into giving a damn about what you have to say has a long history. Hire a therapist. Pay a teacher. Hire a hooker. Buy a round of drinks. Grow the really good weed and bring it to the party.
And maybe remember that other humans have their own needs and desires, and if you want them to put time and energy into giving a damn about your needs, then you need to reciprocate and spend time doing the same for them instead of treating them like a machine that exists only to serve you. This whole post is coming from a place of reducing every relationship to that and it's kind of disgusting.
> You know my favourite bit of that story? I just made it up. Yeah, it's not true. There is no Morgan. Ooh! It's very unsatisfying, isn't it? But I saw him in my head. I saw Morgan in my head.
> Why is it we can feel so robbed when someone tells us a story we just heard isn't true, and yet so satisfied at the end of a fictional novel? I don't know. I don't know.
-- Randy Writes a Novel
If the thing made by a machine is indistinguishable from the thing made by a human, the thing made by a human will be more valuable, simply because being made by a human is an opportunity for a story, and we humans like and value stories.
if you're actually struggling to get people to interact with you the way you want, I think the real problem is your expectations of other people. if they miss the plot, it might be because you timed the conversation poorly, or because you talked to the wrong person for what you need.
this whole post reads like it's coming from someone who sees people as tools to get what they need. the reason I talk to people when I'm struggling with a problem isn't for reference, but for connection, and to get my own wheels turning.
I'll grant that it's interesting to think about. now that LLMs exist, we're forced to assess what value human brains provide. it's so dystopian. but there's no other choice.
I've noticed that a lot of people most skeptical of AI coding tools are biased by their experience working exclusively at some of the top software engineering organizations in the world. As someone who has never worked at a company anywhere close to FAANG, I have worked with both people and organization's that are horrifyingly incompetent. A lot of software organization paradigms are designed to play defense against poorly written software.
I feel similar about self driving cars - they don't have to be perfect when half the people on the road are either high, watching reels while driving, or both.
Exactly, we are focusing on the absolute amount of crashes by "self driving" cars.
What we should focus is that are they more or less prone to accidents than actual humans based on amount of km driven.
Again, there are those Expert Drivers who love their manual transmission BMW because automatics shift in the wrong RPM range and abhor any kind of lane assist because it doesn't drive EXACTLY like they do.
But the vast majority of average people on the road will definitely get gains from lane assist and lane keeping functions in cars.
> A lot of software organization paradigms are designed to play defense against poorly written software.
Maybe. But the organisations who would need the defense most are the some of the least likely to apply them.
Eg it was better run organisations that had version control early, and the worse ones persisted with using shared folders for longer.
And strong type systems like what Haskell or to a lesser extent Rust have to offer are useful as safeguards for anyone, but even more useful when your organisation and its members aren't all that great. Yet again, we see more capable organisations adopting these earlier.
> When a model exhibits hallucination, often providing more context and evidence will dispel it,
I usually have the opposite experience. One a model goes off the rails it becomes harder and harder to steer and after a few corrective prompts they stop working and it’s time for a new context.
This article is nonsense. It's taking advantage of the fact that the problems with LLMs are being described with very broad wording, and then noticing that you can fit human behavior into those descriptions because of how broadly they are worded.
It's like getting a gorilla to fly an airplane, noticing that it crashed the airplane, and saying "humans sometimes crash airplanes too". Both gorillas and humans do things that fit into the broad category "crash an airplane" but the details and circumstances are different.
I have definitely, absolutely, positively had conversations where details have fallen out of the context window of my conversation partner(or mine, for that matter), without the person in question realizing this has happened, and have only via LLMs found a vocabulary to give a name to the phenomenon.
It is a common trope that tech people have a good understanding of computers, but a bad understanding of people. I see no evidence here to dispel that trope.
> the bar for the test gets raised and eventually humans won’t pass the test themselves.
At this point LLMs usually beat humans at the Turing Test! People are more likely to pick the LLM as the human, rather than the human. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
What we observe is also consistent with the idea that when humans have no idea what they're talking about, it's usually more obvious than when LLMs have no idea what they're talking about. In which case the author is lulling themselves into a false sense of confidence chatting with AI instead of humans, merely trading one form of incompetence for another.
The narrative structure of the article would be brilliant satire but I'm 90% certain that the author is serious about the conclusions they drew at the end, which I find sad.
Something about the way the author expresses himself (big words, “I am so smart”, flowery filler) makes me unsurprised he finds it hard to have satisfying conversations with people. If he talked to me like this IRL I wouldn’t be trying to have a deep conversation either, I’d just be looking for the exit.
Lacking a theory of mind for other people is not a sign of superiority.
Jumping from "the author uses language I dislike" straight to "also, he has no theory of mind" is a bit of a leap. Like world record winning long jump kinda stuff.
Also, what big words? 'Proliferation'? 'Incoherent'? The whole article is written at a high school reading level. There's some embedded clauses in longer sentences, but we're not exactly slogging our way through Proust, here.
You are being too generous by saying that there are big words in the text. I find it blunt and uncouth. Actually, that's the problem that I see in the text, an attitude of pessimism and lack of self-reflection. An LLM would certainly give me something more interesting to read!
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 56.0 ms ] threadIt's kind of depressing. I just want the LLM to be a bot that responds to what I say with a useful response. However, for some reason, both Gemini and ChatGPT tend to argue with me so heavily and inject their own weird stupid ideas on things making it even more grating to interact with them which chews away at my normal interpersonal patience which, as someone on the spectrum, was already limited.
As critical as I might be of LLMs, I fear that they already outpaced a good portion of the population "intellectually". There's a lower level, which modern LLMs won't cross, in terms of lack of general knowledge or outright stupidity.
We may have reached a point where we can tell that we're talking to a human, because there's no way a computer would lack such basic knowledge or display similar levels of helplessness.
Are people still debating that? I thought it was settled by the time GPT-4 came out.
The book is following the annual Turing Test competition, in which, humans are chatting with AIs or real humans without knowing which is which and give them a score out of 10 for being most human and the AI that is "the most human" wins the competition. The twist is, not all humans get 10/10 for being human either - so the human that's the most human also wins a prize.
There, lack of interest from the person you talking to or you when listening. It’s because you have different interests. This is a human feature not a flaw. But it’s interesting to think that LLMs might have similar behavior :-)
“I’ll never again ask a human to write a computer program shorter than about a thousand lines, since an LLM will do it better.”
From my personal experience with ChatGPT it can’t even correctly write few lines of code. But i don’t use AI often. I just don’t find it that useful. From what i see it’s mostly a hype bubble that will burst.
But this is my personal opinion and my own observation. I could be wrong :-)
Paying for someone to put some effort into giving a damn about what you have to say has a long history. Hire a therapist. Pay a teacher. Hire a hooker. Buy a round of drinks. Grow the really good weed and bring it to the party.
And maybe remember that other humans have their own needs and desires, and if you want them to put time and energy into giving a damn about your needs, then you need to reciprocate and spend time doing the same for them instead of treating them like a machine that exists only to serve you. This whole post is coming from a place of reducing every relationship to that and it's kind of disgusting.
> Why is it we can feel so robbed when someone tells us a story we just heard isn't true, and yet so satisfied at the end of a fictional novel? I don't know. I don't know.
-- Randy Writes a Novel
If the thing made by a machine is indistinguishable from the thing made by a human, the thing made by a human will be more valuable, simply because being made by a human is an opportunity for a story, and we humans like and value stories.
this might be one of the most sociopathic things I’ve ever read
this whole post reads like it's coming from someone who sees people as tools to get what they need. the reason I talk to people when I'm struggling with a problem isn't for reference, but for connection, and to get my own wheels turning.
I'll grant that it's interesting to think about. now that LLMs exist, we're forced to assess what value human brains provide. it's so dystopian. but there's no other choice.
But this type of... conflict aversion... is definitely more common in LLMs than in humans. Even the most positive humans I know sometimes crack.
I feel similar about self driving cars - they don't have to be perfect when half the people on the road are either high, watching reels while driving, or both.
What we should focus is that are they more or less prone to accidents than actual humans based on amount of km driven.
Again, there are those Expert Drivers who love their manual transmission BMW because automatics shift in the wrong RPM range and abhor any kind of lane assist because it doesn't drive EXACTLY like they do.
But the vast majority of average people on the road will definitely get gains from lane assist and lane keeping functions in cars.
Maybe. But the organisations who would need the defense most are the some of the least likely to apply them.
Eg it was better run organisations that had version control early, and the worse ones persisted with using shared folders for longer.
And strong type systems like what Haskell or to a lesser extent Rust have to offer are useful as safeguards for anyone, but even more useful when your organisation and its members aren't all that great. Yet again, we see more capable organisations adopting these earlier.
I usually have the opposite experience. One a model goes off the rails it becomes harder and harder to steer and after a few corrective prompts they stop working and it’s time for a new context.
It's like getting a gorilla to fly an airplane, noticing that it crashed the airplane, and saying "humans sometimes crash airplanes too". Both gorillas and humans do things that fit into the broad category "crash an airplane" but the details and circumstances are different.
At this point LLMs usually beat humans at the Turing Test! People are more likely to pick the LLM as the human, rather than the human. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
Lacking a theory of mind for other people is not a sign of superiority.
Also, what big words? 'Proliferation'? 'Incoherent'? The whole article is written at a high school reading level. There's some embedded clauses in longer sentences, but we're not exactly slogging our way through Proust, here.