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Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#61

Post by heliumtera »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #38
heliumtera wrote: post #27

They 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…

This is absurdly misanthropic and dehumanizing. I firmly believe that every single person on this entire planet has a depth to them that far, far exceeds anything an LLM could even begin to approximate. I'm sorry you're in a position that you can't see that at all - that each and every one of them feel happiness and sadness and love and hate and fear and rage and inspiration and passion and are utterly human. I hope…

I agree with you, every living being is beautiful in their own way. And good on their own way. But we not very well equipped to follow the rules of logic. The most capable of us can follow a very limited number of logical threads, with very limited steps. I don't consider it dehumanizing because attaining true knowledge is not necessarily human or natural for the human apparatus to process. Given enough strain and effort, we can only dabble in the elevated grounds of information and logic. Most people cannot, that is okay. I am not comparing llms to humans in a broad sense, but specific to reasoning, llms are complete shit and so it is the average human. I am not impressed by llms if that was your impression and I am not saying the average human is inferior or deserve suffering lol

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#62

Post by notnullorvoid »

Unless they are someone that values your opinion there's nothing you can do other than move on.

Some comments here equating it to people who blindly believe things on the internet, but it's worse than that. Many previously rational people essentially getting hypnotized by LLM use and loosing touch of their rational thinking.

It's concerning to watch.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#63

Post by mathgladiator »

Simple. 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 simply having a detailed prompt work on a task and refining something from different lenses. It too AI about an hour to write: https://nexivibe.com/avoid.civil.war.web/

I do this on things that I know very well, and the moment I let it cook and iterate, collect feedback, the results become chef's kiss.

The agentic era that we are in is... very interesting.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#64

Post by whattheheckheck »

katet wrote: post #49

Not 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…

Both are true though

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#66

Post by sublinear »

At the very least, I'm glad most people finally recognize LLMs are being used as a political weapon against education. It's the same old power struggles as ever.

These people may be idiots who are impossible to reason with, but at least for now the LLMs have not been completely driven into the ground by SEO. They might actually be getting a taste of what it feels like to not be an idiot. I'm happy for them, but they'll snap out of it when their trust is broken. It's probably sometime soon anyway.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#67

Post by dumpsterdiver »

ericpauley wrote: post #42
eranation wrote: post #21

Ask 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.

This is an oft-repeated meme, but I’m convinced the people saying it are either blindly repeating it, using bad models/system prompts, or some other issue. Claude Opus will absolutely push back if you disagree. I routinely push back on Claude only to discover on further evaluation that the model was correct. As a test I just did exactly what you said in a Claude Opus 4.6 session about another HN thread. Claude consid…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#68

Post by 000ooo000 »

mathgladiator wrote: post #63

Simple. 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.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#69

Post by heliumtera »

roncesvalles wrote: post #32
heliumtera wrote: post #27

They 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…

The worst are the ones who say "what if human brains are also just like LLMs". If you've thought about this for any length of time, it's very obvious that we aren't.

>If you've thought about this for any length of time

If you full throttle a BWM1000 S RR for a split of a second,at 30mph first gear, it will self eject beneath you. If you do that, for any length of time, you're dead. Do the same on a 50cc motorbike and not much will happen. Even for extended periods of time, not much would happen. You could hold it down until you run out of fuel or the universe gets cold and die, not much would happen.

You see, it's not that they are lazy. Or they haven't put any amount of time into understanding how llms operate. Again I am sorry, most people are not capable, at all, of understanding what is happening at inference time. Most developers, nerds, hackers, who do understand how computers operate, cannot really grasp the basics of what an llm is or what the f is going on. Imagine the average guy, your lawyer, the MBA type of person.

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