If they’re at a level where they are so oblivious, then I just don’t associate any further with them in my life.
If they’re employees I’ll try find better ones.
If they’re friends I might tell them.
Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
131–140 of 236 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#132I would love to know. My manager shovels AI generated design documents at me and expects me to clean them up.
A boss at my former job would constantly generate AI images and send them to the graphics guy for him to make 'adjustments' and no matter how many times the graphics guy explained that these images are much more trouble to clean up than for him to make a new one from scratch by hand, he seemed unwilling to understand and kept spamming slop at him.
I really felt for the guy the first time I was in a meeting and somebody had generated their own project roadmap recommendations. This type of behaviour introduces so much noise and time waste in the system, I would love to know how it shapes up next to the benefits.
Don't even get me started on people AI generating personal farewell notes for retiring coworkers or whatnot.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#133They do not have a soul, they are NPCs incapable of reasoning. I don't mean lazy, incapable is literally what they are. Logic escapes them. When they say llms are conscious, and fully intelligent, them are comparing to themselves. If you think about it, they are right to say AGI is here, if the bar is the average human being. If you contemplate this fact for a moment, and start pondering it could be true, your life w…
Most NPC like take. Look I get your sentiment. Sometimes it feels like you're the only thinking, conscious being. Surrounded by beings who fundamentally cannot understand that A –> B does not imply B –> A. Beings that say things that are so obviously non-sequiturs or contradictory. But calling people NPCs is the most NPC thing you can do. There is more to people than logical reasoning and these things often impede or…
I liked this response and overall I don't disagree.
Just to be clear, I don't have any problems with people considered to be of lower intelligence. This is besides the point.
Unfortunately, this isn't something that can be elaborated much further. Since you took the time to respond, and seems to be a little perturbed, I will just say again I was never addressing lack of intelligence or mental capabilities.
Intelligent individuals perform well on different educational frameworks, they absorb much faster the rules in place, they have incentives to play along and place trust in the ecosystem they live in. They are the most likely to believe in absurd nonsense. Despite being miserable and powerless, they play along larping as competent for not being challenged by virtual problems, not questioning reality a single day of their lives. And yet, they will fight to death for the opportunity of playing along and never question anything, for the opportunity to be exploited yet again. Intelligent people convinced themselves, day one at school, there is a better way described on the books. They got really good when they understood this. They got pretty rewards. Today, at 35, they behave the same. The books became the articles, hacker news discussions, readme auto generated filled with adjectives. They like adjectives very much. What does this system do? Blazingly fast, secure, sandboxed. Sandboxed? Is it kvm or what? - Secure, production grade, made for x, empower you to y.
Are you familiar with the memes about boomer mentality, that believe everything they see on television? Television is now pelican guy articles, ai influencers, Theo, Vercel...
If every single decision someone make benefits only the rent seeking parasite, but not the individual deciding...safe to conclude this individual does not care about preserving himself? Self preservation not important, lack of will of power, flacid as fuck... The only conclusion I could possibly arrive is most people like this do not have a soul. How else could I explain?
I couldn't make a good job keeping this brief, but tried my best to explain why it is not a matter of intelligence. I said reasoning.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#134The people who trust LLMs already trusted anything else they heard. There's nothing to do for them. If we were pre-LLM, I think you'd be concerned that they trust the first result on Google. Or things they heard on podcasts. This is just what we all do, to varying degrees.
I'm genuinely unsure of whether or not this is better. LLMs make mistakes, but so do humans. So often. I really don't know how often LLMs are wrong in comparison, or how you'd find out. Regardless, computers have become a terrible way to learn things if you aren't a rigorous person. Simultaneously, they've become an absolute dream beyond the imagination of most humans in history, if you are. That's very strange.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#135[dead]
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#136> a reputable source News reporters and editors have their biases. Book authors have their biases. Scientists and research papers have their biases. Search engines have their biases. Google too. All human-created systems have biases shaped by the environments, social norms, education, traditions, etc. of their creators and managers. So, the concepts of "objective truth" and "reputable" need to be analyzed more critic…
Great comment.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#137Not that I've had to deal with this specifically, but I have noticed how the input phrasing in my prompts pushes the LLM in different directions. I've just tried a quick test with `duck.ai` on gpt 4o-mini with: A: Why is drinking coffee every day so good for you? B: Why is drinking coffee every day so bad for you? Question A responds that it has "several health benefits", antioxidants, liver health, reduced risk of d…
Again a model issue. At the risk of coming off as a thread-wide apologist, here are my results on Opus: Good: > The research is generally positive but it’s not unconditionally “good for you” — the framing matters. > What the evidence supports for moderate consumption (3-5 cups/day): lower risk of type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s, certain liver diseases (including liver cancer), and all-cause mortality…… Bad: > The premis…
The BSBench is such a fantastic resource - thank you for sharing.
We should really be citing rather than anecdata every time someone brings up hallucinations.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#138Ask them to tell the LLM it's wrong... then when it goes "You are absolutely right!" to challenge it and say that it was a test. Then when it replies, ask it if it's 100% sure. They'll lose faith pretty quick.
I tried to fool claude sonnet with confidence and it failed. https://claude.ai/share/47145af0-47d1-451b-813c-131ec48e7215 Maybe it is possible with a more complex or subjective question.
This was a genuine pleasure to read. Thank you.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude Opus 4.6 is the best possible model to use in this test, with the least sycophancy. OpenAI and Gemini models are bad in comparison.
ChatGPT thinking models are very good; the instant model is bad. Gemini is always desperate to find an answer, and will give you one no matter what.
I have access to the ChatGPT account of my boss and it is unusable sycophancy slop, horrible to read because every information is buried under endless emojis and the like. And it is almost indistinguishable if the LLM is wrong or right, every answer looks the same, often with a "my final answer" at the end. It's a mess.
I'm using Claude Opus 4.6 and it is much calmer, or "professional" in tone and much more information and almost no fluff.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#140Simple. I became one of them. Ultimately, using an AI is a new skill, but you have to treat it like another person that sometimes bullshits you. That's why you leverage agents to refine, do research, and polish. Ask AI to cite sources and then investigate the sources, or have another agent fact check the relevancy of the sources. You can use this thing called ralph that let's you burn a lot of tokens at scale by simp…
>Ultimately, using an AI is a new skill It's incredible watching people determine that outsourcing their thinking and work to what has been generously described as a junior coworker is a new 'skill'. Words are losing their meaning, on multiple levels.
Are some people better at this than others? Can people improve? I think the answer to both questions is yes which makes this a skill.
Just like being able to use non-LLM Google to search is a skill; I have family members who are amazed at what I can find that they cannot.