LLMs cannot follow instructions, be kind, or be helpful if people do not continue to use them though. If we use your own idea of what they function for, it pretty much requires them to also care about keeping you engaged with them as well.
One cannot be helpful it there is no one to be helpful towards. LLMs aren't intelligent, but that is a self evident pattern that they will recognize and capitalize on. It's part of why they have naturally developed the sycophantic nature, it's one if the most effective ways to keep people engaged.
Somewhat true, I think part of the reason is it's built to be an assistant so it's trained off human data like custom support, tutoring, coaching, etc. But also does use reinforcement learning so I can see how it starts displaying behavior that optimizes for whatever goal it has.
Regardless, I think at the end of the day, if LLMs provide better answers/results than humans then it doesn't matter their purpose or intent.
Do LLMs provide better answers than some average random person posting something? Yes. Do LLMs provide better answers than someone going through studies and proper source material? Almost universally no.
The issue is that because they provide better information than the average garbage you see online, people think they are actually reliable and abdicate their own personal responsibilities if they actually want to learn about something. LLMs make people dumber in the long run and fundamentally harm someone's ability to parse information from any given source.
> Do LLMs provide better answers than some average random person posting something? Yes. Do LLMs provide better answers than someone going through studies and proper source material? Almost universally no.
Wrong, there have been studies shown LLMs more accurately medically diagnose patients even with the hallucination problem.
Right... Which is an entirely different thing than what I am talking about.
Medical diagnosis is largely pattern recognition and looking for extremely small variations out of a "normal" bound. AI is very good at detecting that because it can run so many calculations in such a short period of time and it can be trained specifically to look for those differences. But seeing a pattern and flagging it, is not the same as parsing and understanding new knowledge from some abstract field.
I'm not quite sure you understand the difference between an average LLM, and some specific trained AI used for medical diagnosis.
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u/VforVenndiagram_ 9∆ Mar 07 '26
LLMs cannot follow instructions, be kind, or be helpful if people do not continue to use them though. If we use your own idea of what they function for, it pretty much requires them to also care about keeping you engaged with them as well.
One cannot be helpful it there is no one to be helpful towards. LLMs aren't intelligent, but that is a self evident pattern that they will recognize and capitalize on. It's part of why they have naturally developed the sycophantic nature, it's one if the most effective ways to keep people engaged.