The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
ohadravid.github.io
The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
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Re: The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
#2I feel the opposite. Interacting with humans, I definitely pay a social tax - I have to negotiate the feelings of the people involved. With LLMs there is no social tax, I can be as blunt as I like. But there are other taxes to pay with LLMs; they don't learn, they BS relentlessly, there is less fun and camaraderie.
But "social tax"? No, there is not a social tax.
Re: The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
#3I just use it as Google, like 'ts Omit example' or something.
so I don't get exhausted. If you write complete sentences and say please to the clankers, you're definitely gonna waste energy.
I agree they are too slow though, especially when they "Think" for so long and then say "something went wrong" after 30s.
Re: The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
#4I feel the opposite. Interacting with humans, I definitely pay a social tax - I have to negotiate the feelings of the people involved. With LLMs there is no social tax, I can be as blunt as I like. But there are other taxes to pay with LLMs; they don't learn, they BS relentlessly, there is less fun and camaraderie. But "social tax"? No, there is not a social tax.
I agree. I’m a social person but I also like my purely functional conversations with LLMs, and I have a lot of them going at once!
Doesn’t replace conversations with other people but at the same time I feel no tax talking to the LLMs.
Re: The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
#5I feel the opposite. Interacting with humans, I definitely pay a social tax - I have to negotiate the feelings of the people involved. With LLMs there is no social tax, I can be as blunt as I like. But there are other taxes to pay with LLMs; they don't learn, they BS relentlessly, there is less fun and camaraderie. But "social tax"? No, there is not a social tax.
The first-order social consequences aren't truly there but i think the format in which you interface with the tool can trick you into behaving as if they were, which is taxing it itself.
Re: The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
#6>> Is it worth the social brainwork? IDK, for some tasks maybe - there are things a single person can do now that would have been impossible a year ago. But for all tasks? And wouldn’t that social brainwork do more good if it was directed at the real people you are working with?
It's the opposite. Many people find it exhausting to interact with humans, and do so only because they are required to.
Humans often don't understand what you are saying or asking, and they may not know exactly what steps they need to take to find the answer. They get tired. They might get their pride hurt. They might get angry or frustrated. They might judge you because your question is silly or just wrong.
LLMs, for all their faults, have none of these issues. I'm not saying I'd rather talk to LLMs all day every day, but when trying to get shit done, they really can be the superior coworker, especially if you're an introvert and suffer from social-battery-drainage issues.
Re: The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
#7I feel the opposite. Interacting with humans, I definitely pay a social tax - I have to negotiate the feelings of the people involved. With LLMs there is no social tax, I can be as blunt as I like. But there are other taxes to pay with LLMs; they don't learn, they BS relentlessly, there is less fun and camaraderie. But "social tax"? No, there is not a social tax.
There are ways to put a superficial personality on the LLM which can break up some of the mannerisms that get old. Give it a new accent, allow it to keep a memory of things that nudge it into one personality or another, make it behave differently on weekdays vs weekends. Its still superficial, but if you work with it any reasonable amount of time, I think having the ability to change some of the characteristics can make it more..."fun" I guess.
Re: The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
#8I feel the opposite. Interacting with humans, I definitely pay a social tax - I have to negotiate the feelings of the people involved. With LLMs there is no social tax, I can be as blunt as I like. But there are other taxes to pay with LLMs; they don't learn, they BS relentlessly, there is less fun and camaraderie. But "social tax"? No, there is not a social tax.
Agreed, I haven't yet internalized them not remembering feedback from a couple days ago, which humans typically would. The process of remembering to update the context isn't entirely natural to me to this day.
Re: The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
#9I’ve been experiencing similar feelings. Working with LLMs often takes almost as much mental energy as working with people, but the payoff does not always scale in the same way.
I think we are still on the early days of LLMs. Right now, using them productively requires deliberate thought and an acute knowledge of their limitations. As the author says, it’s easy to get angry at a model, or to foolishly let it nudge you towards more code and more tests — even when that is suboptimal.
To a certain extent, models keep getting better and better at discerning our intentions and providing value. Yet I am not sure whether we will reach a point where using them successfully no longer causes the kind of fatigue that it does today.
Re: The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
#10>> Is it worth the social brainwork? IDK, for some tasks maybe - there are things a single person can do now that would have been impossible a year ago. But for all tasks? And wouldn’t that social brainwork do more good if it was directed at the real people you are working with? It's the opposite. Many people find it exhausting to interact with humans, and do so only because they are required to. Humans often don't u…
Fooling yourself into thinking the LLMs are "understanding" what you are saying or asking is a trap. The output you get may be useful, but it is not due to any sort of understanding.
The elements of human work you mentioned are why it can be both rewarding and painful to interact with humans, but at the end of the day it is important to keep trying to do that work/keep trying to interact with each other. I don't know if we want to go back to cubicles where we just talk to robots all day. Of course some work environments are just awful, and there is not much remedy for that.