site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 10, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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?

I like to use it to get summary answers to questions which would otherwise require me to read many different sources. For example you might ask it, "What was it like to work as a police officer in Portsmouth, OH in 1954?" There may be no single article that describes this, but the AI will paint a plausible picture if you ask it to, and will fill in a number of details you might not think of on your own.

It works well in this application because I don't need hard facts or a working solution to a problem; I want a general idea and it gives me quite a full one.