The assertion was the brainstorming with an LLM was like brainstorming with a rubber duck. It is not, as I’ve outlined in another comment.
Brainstorming with another person can also lead to biases, you’re correct, but your partner is less likely to just agree with your ideas, or to have built in biases that you’re not aware of.
I dont know what magical humans you interact with. But the claim someone else doesn’t have a bias you may not be aware of… is fucking wild. People are wildly complex and the chances of you even REMOTELY understanding a fraction of their biases or thought processes with out extreme amounts of exposure and discussion with them is comical at best.
An LLM is infinitely more predictable and obvious in its biases then a human.
I will 100% agree on the people are less likely to just agree with you. Unless they really do not give a shit about the work at hand but then its really obvious.
The biases I’m talking about here are things like their generally preferred approach to solving problems, or how optimistic or pessimistic their outlook on certain classes of problems are. These are things you tend to know about the people you’re likely to brainstorm with, plus you can also be fairly sure that you’re all working towards the same goal. When you’re using an LLM like a partner to do this you can’t know those biases, as they’re externally controlled, you can’t know how they’ve changed since the last time you interacted with it, because the training data may have been updated, and it’s definitely not working towards the same goal as you because it’s not working towards anything, it’s just following statistical patterns in its training data.
A handful of employees in a conference room are more likely to just agree. Those same employees will be less agreeable on video, and even less so in the company chat. People will consciously or unconsciously hide their biases in most contexts.
A handful of employees in a conference room are more likely to just agree.
I see you’ve never met my coworkers before! The politest way to describe that sort of gathering would be “a free and frank exchange of opinions”. I quite like them for that. The point is that I know their biases already, so I can adjust for them, and I can be confident that they’re actually trying to achieve the same thing I am, rather than regurgitating a probabilistically derived sequence of tokens that strongly resemble, but aren’t, actual thought.
The biases I’m talking about here are usually more along the lines of preferred approaches to problems, general pessimism or optimism in outlook, and any “oneupmanship” that is known to occur, rather than anything people tend to hide.
I will give you that on average, a human partner is less likely to agree. But there are plenty who will just agree with everything you say. So as humans, we evaluate what kind of partner we have, and treat their feedback accordingly. It’s the same with AI. You could of course tell AI not to be that way if you want.
When brainstorming with an AI, you aren’t brainstorming with their CEO. Even Grok can’t do that, no matter how much they try. Amd that is why people don’t use grok.
They do have some influence over what the AI says… but they also influence people with news and ads. So both the person and the AI are being influenced by billionaires and companies. The person by many many more actually.
So when I brainstorm with a person, they are never confidently wrong? And they never have their own ideas on how I should do it.
The assertion was the brainstorming with an LLM was like brainstorming with a rubber duck. It is not, as I’ve outlined in another comment.
Brainstorming with another person can also lead to biases, you’re correct, but your partner is less likely to just agree with your ideas, or to have built in biases that you’re not aware of.
I dont know what magical humans you interact with. But the claim someone else doesn’t have a bias you may not be aware of… is fucking wild. People are wildly complex and the chances of you even REMOTELY understanding a fraction of their biases or thought processes with out extreme amounts of exposure and discussion with them is comical at best.
An LLM is infinitely more predictable and obvious in its biases then a human.
I will 100% agree on the people are less likely to just agree with you. Unless they really do not give a shit about the work at hand but then its really obvious.
The biases I’m talking about here are things like their generally preferred approach to solving problems, or how optimistic or pessimistic their outlook on certain classes of problems are. These are things you tend to know about the people you’re likely to brainstorm with, plus you can also be fairly sure that you’re all working towards the same goal. When you’re using an LLM like a partner to do this you can’t know those biases, as they’re externally controlled, you can’t know how they’ve changed since the last time you interacted with it, because the training data may have been updated, and it’s definitely not working towards the same goal as you because it’s not working towards anything, it’s just following statistical patterns in its training data.
Hard agree. And, uh, disagree.
A handful of employees in a conference room are more likely to just agree. Those same employees will be less agreeable on video, and even less so in the company chat. People will consciously or unconsciously hide their biases in most contexts.
I see you’ve never met my coworkers before! The politest way to describe that sort of gathering would be “a free and frank exchange of opinions”. I quite like them for that. The point is that I know their biases already, so I can adjust for them, and I can be confident that they’re actually trying to achieve the same thing I am, rather than regurgitating a probabilistically derived sequence of tokens that strongly resemble, but aren’t, actual thought.
The biases I’m talking about here are usually more along the lines of preferred approaches to problems, general pessimism or optimism in outlook, and any “oneupmanship” that is known to occur, rather than anything people tend to hide.
I will give you that on average, a human partner is less likely to agree. But there are plenty who will just agree with everything you say. So as humans, we evaluate what kind of partner we have, and treat their feedback accordingly. It’s the same with AI. You could of course tell AI not to be that way if you want.
Does that person have billions of dollars and power over all political leaders to sway a country toward totalitarianism ? No? Thats the difference.
When brainstorming with an AI, you aren’t brainstorming with their CEO. Even Grok can’t do that, no matter how much they try. Amd that is why people don’t use grok. They do have some influence over what the AI says… but they also influence people with news and ads. So both the person and the AI are being influenced by billionaires and companies. The person by many many more actually.