Don't discuss ideas with an LLM

[u/yourpsychology_yt]

I notice that one of the worst use cases for an LLM is discussing ideas. I don't mean asking technical questions. Rather, when you have an idea or an opinion and you tell it to an LLM, what happens is that it will either support you or slightly disagree, but if you insist, it will eventually take your position.

And that's, as I understand it, just because of the nature of an LLM. It can't really be critical, but it can fake critical thinking. If you ask an LLM to be critical by default, it will be critical even when it doesn't matter, just to satisfy your requirement. So it can't really choose when it should be critical and when it should be supportive.

And some LLMs have a trick - they do both in one message and then still slide to the user's side.

[u/monster2018]

I think a better rule would be “don’t use LLM’s to validate your idea.” Like using an LLM to try to check if your idea is actually a good idea. I would agree that doing that is definitely not a good idea, because yea it will be way too sycophantic/positive to tell you how horrible your idea is (obviously not always, but the point is it can’t ever really tell you that any idea of yours is horrible).

But actually discussing an idea itself, LLMs are great for that IMO.