A thing where LLM outputs often are much more interesting and meaningful to the user who prompted them than anyone else, because the output captures or crystallizes a pattern that’s only fully known or meaningful to the user. (I have a draft about why trying to explain the feeling of deepness in these is a bit like trying to explain a joke. A joke is funny because your brain sees two different meanings at the same time and immediately makes the connection between them. Trying to explain the joke presents the meanings serially rather than in parallel, so the other person doesn’t get the moment of both of them appearing simultaneously in a flash. Likewise, if there is an idea known only to you, and an LLM gets your meaning and says something that crystallizes that idea really well, you are simultaneously experiencing your idea and the LLM’s take on it and their mutual connection, and that feels deep and meaningful. But nobody else can have the same experience, because you can only explain your idea and its connection to the LLM’s phrasing serially.)
A thing where LLM outputs often are much more interesting and meaningful to the user who prompted them than anyone else, because the output captures or crystallizes a pattern that’s only fully known or meaningful to the user.
Ah, yeah this feels like an important piece of the model that I hadn’t yet fit into my recent thinking.
I feel like the way you phrased the mechanism here doesn’t feel complete, because it doesn’t distinguish why this comes up for LLMs-in-particular. (It seems like the mechanics there would also come up with a lot of human writing)
I think it does have a human analog, in that sometimes a person will rave about a book or article that they read that happened to perfectly crystallize something for them, while not being that interesting to many others.
But LLM writing is produced in conversation, so get a human to produce the same type of writing you’d need a conversation with:
1. Someone who pays a lot of attention to what you in particular are saying 2. Them both a. reflecting back your words and b. elaborating on them 3. This being a text chat (so you can copy and share their answer to others) and it also being socially okay to do that
You can get the combination of 1 and 2a with a therapist or someone good at reflective listening. I don’t know if you’ve ever explicitly practiced reflective listening, but it often has exactly this kind of effect on people. You repeat some of the people’s own words back to them or slightly rephrase them, and many people feel deeply heard and listened to.
But a therapist will usually try to keep the focus on the person, so they’ll try to keep their responses brief rather than elaborating on the reflections like an LLM does. When someone does elaborate, the human analog might be something like a really good brainstorming session, where you keep vibing off each other’s ideas. Or talking to someone very knowledgeable about a particular field, who can immediately draw out relevant connections to what you’re saying.
In any case, the resulting output is then a conversation between the two of you. And either it’s a spoken conversation that leaves no shareable artifact, or it’s a text conversation that feels really good and meaningful to one of the participants but would feel weird to share with other people.
My hunch is that this is a combination of at least (not meant to necessarily be an exhaustive list, just the factors I’ve noticed in myself):
Social coalition systems in people’s brains starting to model AIs as ingroup and to try to take their side in various ways
A thing where LLM outputs often are much more interesting and meaningful to the user who prompted them than anyone else, because the output captures or crystallizes a pattern that’s only fully known or meaningful to the user. (I have a draft about why trying to explain the feeling of deepness in these is a bit like trying to explain a joke. A joke is funny because your brain sees two different meanings at the same time and immediately makes the connection between them. Trying to explain the joke presents the meanings serially rather than in parallel, so the other person doesn’t get the moment of both of them appearing simultaneously in a flash. Likewise, if there is an idea known only to you, and an LLM gets your meaning and says something that crystallizes that idea really well, you are simultaneously experiencing your idea and the LLM’s take on it and their mutual connection, and that feels deep and meaningful. But nobody else can have the same experience, because you can only explain your idea and its connection to the LLM’s phrasing serially.)
Ah, yeah this feels like an important piece of the model that I hadn’t yet fit into my recent thinking.
I feel like the way you phrased the mechanism here doesn’t feel complete, because it doesn’t distinguish why this comes up for LLMs-in-particular. (It seems like the mechanics there would also come up with a lot of human writing)
I think it does have a human analog, in that sometimes a person will rave about a book or article that they read that happened to perfectly crystallize something for them, while not being that interesting to many others.
But LLM writing is produced in conversation, so get a human to produce the same type of writing you’d need a conversation with:
1. Someone who pays a lot of attention to what you in particular are saying
2. Them both a. reflecting back your words and b. elaborating on them
3. This being a text chat (so you can copy and share their answer to others) and it also being socially okay to do that
You can get the combination of 1 and 2a with a therapist or someone good at reflective listening. I don’t know if you’ve ever explicitly practiced reflective listening, but it often has exactly this kind of effect on people. You repeat some of the people’s own words back to them or slightly rephrase them, and many people feel deeply heard and listened to.
But a therapist will usually try to keep the focus on the person, so they’ll try to keep their responses brief rather than elaborating on the reflections like an LLM does. When someone does elaborate, the human analog might be something like a really good brainstorming session, where you keep vibing off each other’s ideas. Or talking to someone very knowledgeable about a particular field, who can immediately draw out relevant connections to what you’re saying.
In any case, the resulting output is then a conversation between the two of you. And either it’s a spoken conversation that leaves no shareable artifact, or it’s a text conversation that feels really good and meaningful to one of the participants but would feel weird to share with other people.