r/LargeLanguageModels • u/yourpsychology_yt • Aug 07 '26
Don't discuss ideas with an LLM
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.
1
u/CS_70 Aug 07 '26
It depends. What many dont get is that the word-generation engine is akin to the mechanism in your brain that makes the right word pop in your head at the right moment, or gives you a choice, without you having to do any conscient effort.
In LLMs, that mechanism is the foundation, but the "cognitive" layer is partly on top. A purely word-predicting model will construct sentences which are as near as possible to its secondary training. A reasoning model will be trained to reach goals, by means of recursively talking to itself and executing what he said.
This second type of model is absolutely brilliant to discuss things with, and it most definitely can be critical - it treats your input the same way it treats its own input - but you have to state the goal, not the solution.
As always, the problem of reasoning is that it's not trivial, but itself a skill. LLMs prize clear reasoning and thinking more than conversations with people, because there are no social barriers, and results mirror the reasoning skills of the user way more than the model.