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Comment by chankstein38 | Hacker News Reader

While I haven't experienced LLMs correcting most (or any) of the problems listed fully and consistently, I do agree that consistent use of LLMs and dealing with their frustrations has worn my patience for conversations with people who exhibit the same issues when talking.

It's kind of depressing. I just want the LLM to be a bot that responds to what I say with a useful response. However, for some reason, both Gemini and ChatGPT tend to argue with me so heavily and inject their own weird stupid ideas on things making it even more grating to interact with them which chews away at my normal interpersonal patience which, as someone on the spectrum, was already limited.

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> However, for some reason, both Gemini and ChatGPT tend to argue with me so heavily and inject their own weird stupid ideas on things

do you have examples of this?

asking because this is not what happens to me. one of the main things i worry about when interacting with the llm is that they agree with me too easily.

This is why i simply do not bother with them unless the task i need is so specific that theres no room for argument, like yesterday i asked it to generate me a bash script that ran aws ssm commands for all the following instance IDs. It did that as a two shot.

But long conversations are never worth it.

>>> … However, for some reason, both Gemini and ChatGPT tend to argue with me so heavily and inject their own weird stupid ideas on things …

This is something I have not experienced. Can you provide examples ?

Yeah this is exactly opposite my issue with LLMs. They often take what you say as the truth when it absolutely could not be.

There was a period when coding agents would always agree with you, even if you gave them a really bad idea. They’d always start with something like, “You’re right — I should…”.

Back then, what we actually wanted was for them to push back and argue with us.

I have taken the stance to not argue with LLMs, don't give them any clues, and don't ask them to roleplay. Tell them no more than what they need to know.

And if they get the answer wrong, don't try to correct them or guide them, there is a high chance they don't have the answer and what follow will be hallucinations. You can ask for details, but don't try to go against it, it will just assume you are right (even if you are not) and hallucinate around that. Keep what you already know to yourself.

As for the "you are an expert" prompts, it will mostly just make the LLM speak more authoritatively, but it doesn't mean it will be more correct. My strategy is now to give the LLM as much freedom as it can get, it may not be the best way to extract all the knowledge it has, but it helps spot hallucinations.

You can argue with actual people, if both of you are open enough, something greater make come out of it, but if not, it is useless, and with LLMs it is always useless, they are pretrained, they won't get better in the future because that little conversation sparked their interest. And on your side, you will just have your own points rephrased and sent back to you, and that will just put you deeper in your own bubble.

What's the purpose of your stance? What are you trying to achieve?

> However, for some reason, both Gemini and ChatGPT tend to argue with me

The trick here is: "Be succinct. No commentary."

And sometimes a healthy dose of expressing frustration or anger (cursing, berating, threatening) also gets them to STFU and do the thing. As in literally: "I don't give a fuck about your stupid fucking opinions on the matter. Do it exactly as I specified"

Also generally the very first time it expresses any of that weird shit, your context is toast. So even correcting it is reinforcing. Just regenerate the response.

Last time I bawled out an LLM and forced it to change its mind, I later realized that the LLM was right the first time.

One of those "Who am I and how did I end up in this hole in the ground, and where did all these carrots and brightly-colored eggs come from?" moments, of the sort that seem to be coming more and more frequently lately.

Yeah, same. Lately almost every time I think "Oh no way, this is not the correct way/not the optimal way/it's a hallucination" it later turns out that it's actually the correct way/the optimal way/it's not a hallucination. I now think twice before doing anything differently than what the LLM tells me unless I'm an expert on the subject and can already spot mistakes easily.

It seems like they really figured out grounding and the like in the last couple of months.

I wouldn't worry too much about these false negatives: your human friends might be cross if you constantly accuse them of being wrong when they are actually right, but the LLMs are too polite to hold a grudge.

> ChatGPT tend to argue with me so heavily

I have found that quite often when ChatGPT digs in on something, that it is in fact right, and I was the one that was wrong. Not always, maybe not even most of the time, but enough that it does give me pause and make me double check.

Also, when you have an LLM that is too agreeable, that is how it gets into a folie a deux situation and starts participating in user's delusions, with disastrous outcomes.

> Also, when you have an LLM that is too agreeable...

It's not a question of whether an LLM should be agreeable or argumentative. It should aim to be correct - it should be agreeable about subjective details and matters of taste, it should be argumentative when the user is wrong about a matter of fact or made an error, and it should be inquisitive and capable of actually re-evaluating a stance in a coherent and logically sound manner when challenged by the user instead of either "digging in" or just blindly agreeing.

> it should be agreeable about subjective details and matters of taste,

What if your subjective opinion is that you think life isn't worth living, how should an LLM respond to that.

That's philosophy and mental health, I was talking about technical or other "work" topics.

But to answer the question, it depends on the framing - if someone starts the chat by saying that they feel like life isn't worth living then the LLM should probably suggest reaching out to local mental health services and either stop the conversation or play a role in "listening" to them. It shouldn't judge, encourage, or agree necessarily. But it would probably be best to cut the conversation unless there's a really high level of confidence that the system won't cause harm.

This is what people should want from an intellectual slave, sure, and I don't think it's going to happen for llms.

Which is not an easy thing to tune for.

So much easier to just make it agree all the time or disagree all the time. And trying to bottle the lightning often just causes degeneracy when you fail.

This is my experience too. About 2/3 of the time my question/prompt contained ambiguity and it interpreted it differently (but validly), so it's just about misunderstanding, but maybe 1/3 of the time I'm surprised to discover something I didn't know. I double-check it on Wikipedia and a couple of other places and learn something new.

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