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Notes -
How do you all interact with LLMs?
I’ve seen a few articles recently noting the rise of AI as a buddy / therapist or whatever. It’s usually beside the point of the article but an implicit notion is that lot of folks regularly ‘chat’ with AI as if it were a person.
Which I find baffling. Outside of the very early novelty, I find this way of interacting extremely boring and tedious, and generally find the fact that AI wants to get conversational with me a general frustrater.
If I’m not using AI as a utility ‘write X, troubleshoot Y, give me steps for Z’, and I’m using it recreationally / casually, it’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board. And i genuinely find negative value in the fact that the former is constantly interrupted with the attempt to be the latter.
So my question is again, how far outside of the grain am I?
Like Corvos, I like how you can use AI as a sounding board and maybe get information that’s useful back. I take it with a grain of salt — I notice details in most responses that don’t match the actual facts — but occasionally I’ve gotten some great “deep cut” information on very specific topics that either was sourced to a link I could verify or started me on a course to verify the claim myself.
I don’t really chat with AI as a person, though I do use very human-like language similar to how I write on the motte. I do know people who’ve explored chatting with AI as a person, giving it a name, telling it about daily details to see what it’ll say. But I don’t relate to AI in that way.
I’d compare using AI for brainstorming to the “active placebo” version of rubber duck debugging: it’s a good excuse to actually write out what you’re thinking, with the possibility of something valuable coming back at you, so you have incentive to be detailed. It’s happened to me more than once that I’ve typed out a technical or personal problem as an AI prompt and figured out the right solution in the process of writing it.
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