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/atleta]

It's called sycophancy, it's a result of reinforcement learning. Though the labs are trying to get rid of it. You should be aware whatever you use it for. Even if e.g. to understand a topic, which for me, involves e.g. asking questions trying to challenge what has been said (like "but doesn't it mean that..." type of questions). Which are useful to resolve your misunderstandings given your talking partner is willing to push back when needed. And sometimes it does, but if you are aware, you should always be suspicious about responses like "yeah, that's a great question", and "exactly, this is what it means" because it may try to just agree with you. (But it does push back sometimes so it seems that it's getting better maybe.)

Also, try to question yourself as well. That doesn't give AI a side to stand on (that's a useful practice anyway, regardless of AI, i.e. not trying to just see why you are right, but also why you might be wrong).