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by dougb5 833 days ago
I don't know, some of the most satisfying conversations I've had with real people have lots of interruptions and cross-talk. Anyway, I'd much rather my friend interrupt me than let me prattle on about something stupid.

Good dialogue can be parallel streams of communication; people rarely do strict turn-taking. The half-duplex nature of current chatbots feels very constraining.

2 comments

Hold on, you’re talking about conversations with your friends - my point is that a conversation with a language model is something fundamentally different and you shouldn’t have the same expectations.
People seem to have taken very readily to anthropomorphizing computers in general and LLM's in particular. Anthropomorphizing seems like a feature of our brains. Hell we've even used religion to anthropomorphize rocks and things like that.
I don't have those expectations of current models. Your post says "I have no idea why anyone would want this" and so I explained why I might want this. It's not just me, there are many companies hawking AI therapists, friends, romantic partners, etc., and interruptions would be useful in these contexts too. These companies seem mostly sketchy to me but I can't deny there's demand for their products.
right - this is what I meant.