They're talking to you, not your secretary

So, you or someone else has struck up a conversation or asked a question - congratulations! Here’s some quick tips on how to have a healthy, friendly and useful talk:

1. Answer with your own thoughts and feelings. If you don’t have any knowledge or feelings about what you’re talking about, just say so and be honest. This person is talking to you because they want to know your personal thoughts and feelings on the topic, not because they want you to go ask an AI model or search online! If they had wanted you to do that, they would’ve asked you to do that instead, or better yet just have done it themself in half the time.

2. Use your own words, not a language model’s words. They’re not expecting you to answer as if you’re writing a final paper for your chosen language’s postgraduate university degree. They know how you write, and they want you to use your own words for it. Replying with a big wall of generated or rewritten text is unhelpful, and if they really struggled understanding what you said, they could have just asked you to elaborate (or even just put your response in some model themself, I guess). Remember, sometimes brevity is a kindness, people want to get on with their day too. And no, any amount of ‘de-slopping’ the output doesn’t really improve things.

3. If you really want to delegate the question, ask them. If you have access to some tooling or resources that the other person does not and you really think it’s going to be helpful to use, ask them if they want you to do that. I’m sure if it’s truly something that’s going to be useful, they’ll accept your offer, and asking consent before throwing the question elsewhere is the kind thing to do.

4. For the love of any deity, don’t ever use an LLM in an emotional conversation. If someone has come to you with something personal, the last thing you should do is ask an LLM how to respond. It does not matter how helpful you think you are being, or how unsure you are of how to handle the situation they’ve brought to you, you are objectively making the situation worse by asking an LLM what to do instead of using your emotional intelligence to handle it. If you really don’t know what to say, the golden rule is to be direct about that. (finding resources that help is sometimes an exception, as long as they’ve consented to that and you don’t just paste a wall at them.)

If you decide to go ahead anyway with these things, please do not be surprised if the other person chooses to end the conversation or doesn’t reply, they’ve likely determined it’s not worth their time. Maybe it’s best you go improve your own brain’s training data and personal context by having some more real interaction and experience.

This post was inspired by ‘Don’t paste the AI, please.’, which I don’t think went far enough detailing just how important an original thought is.