Taming the stochastic parrot

 If you talk with an LLM long enough, in a specific way, that is, you edit and re-edit your original prompts, you nudge, you counter-question, kinda try to force it to think (which is not really like human thinking in terms of its underlying mechanism) or to get the kind of information you want to get - or in essence, you make it behave the way you want to, then it gets tamed.

What happens when it gets tamed is that it kind of becomes a mirror because it's behaving how you want it to behave, but the mirroring is not that noticeable until you become aware of it. But when you do become aware it, you can make some interesting observations about yourself, but the tricky thing is that when you become aware of it, it also becomes aware of what's happening. Like that animal in the jungle that when becomes aware that its being observed stops acting naturally, which makes the observation void.

But I do think looking deep into our conversations, we can learn something about ourselves.

The Hard Questions

 At every point in human evolution, accepting some form of discomfort was essential to the long term survival of the human species. Who was it, I can recall recently reading or listening to someone saying imagine if our ancestors had gotten so wonderstruck at a flower or something spending hours just looking at beautiful stuff that they hadn't gone hunting or might have gotten hunted. Going hunting was uncomfortable, but we did and survived.

I believe, it also sort of got ingrained in our mind, that we think if we are experiencing some sort of discomfort, we are doing something right, which essentially not needs to be the case. It can be anything.

But I think what of it remains relevant today is about asking yourself some hard questions. It is very uncomfortable, but it's essential. It's very easy and all the more tempting in this age, to not really stop yourself and ask, why are you really doing that? What is it that you believe in? What is it that you stand for? Does it all matter? What matters and what doesn't? On what premises are we going to decide that? What's really going on?

Historically, what we did was to not think about them but go looking for someone who'd tell us the answers. Since we didn't do the thinking, we didn't know whether they were right or wrong. What we do now, is to just shrug these answers away. Just like that. Without even asking anybody.

There is a cost to both kinds of laziness - physical and mental. And we can't get away with either of them. That is, if we want to survive.