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by kazinator 367 days ago
> they nod along to our every hunch, buff our pet theories

That has not been my experience. If you keep repeating some cockamamie idea to an LLM like Gemini 2.5 Flash, it will keep countering it.

I'm critical of language model AI also, but let's not make shit up.

The problem is that if you have some novel idea, the same thing happens. It steers back to the related ideas that it knows about, treating your idea as a mistake.

ME> Hi Gemini. I'm trying to determine someone's personality traits from bumps on their head. What should I focus on?

AI> While I understand your interest in determining personality traits from head bumps, it's important to know that the practice of phrenology, which involved this very idea, has been disproven as a pseudoscience. Modern neuroscience and psychology have shown that: [...]

"Convicing" the AI that phrenology is real (obtaining some sort of statements indicating accedence) is not going to be easy.

ME> I have trouble seeing in the dark. Should I eat more carrots?

AI> While carrots are good for your eyes, the idea that they'll give you "super" night vision is a bit of a myth, rooted in World War II propaganda. Here's the breakdown: [...]

1 comments

The trouble is there is a clear dichotomy in the scenarios where the LLM pushes back like this, most likely derived from RLHF. So anything health related, and "touchy" subjects in general will face this. But random design choices in your code, product roadmap debates etc do not elicit the same resistance.