notabot

sore bought

Sore what bought???

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.

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.

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.

Brainstorming solo versus brainstorming in a group are very different activities. Your assertion was that brainstorming with an LLM, which feeds back more-or-less like another participant, was the same as brainstorming with a rubber duck, i.e. solo, which it is not.

Brainstorming solo is an exercise in fully exploring your understanding of a subject, and developing new insights or approaches to it. Brainstorming as a group is more about finding a consensus solution or approach. Doing so with an LLM is much closer to the latter, however your “partner” has no actual experience but still presents feedback as though it did, and, critically, has an inbuilt tendancy to confirm your biases. Thinking of that like either solo or group brainstorming will automatically warp your thought processes by encouraging you to stay on certain tracks.

The rubber duck doesn’t feed back anything that might affect how you think. It’s more like brainstorming with someone who is both sycophantic and has their own (unthought-though) ideas about how you should do it. At best it’s a waste of tokens because a rubber duck would have worked, at worst it directs your thought process rather than letting you think.

You have, once again, removed the artist’s name from the image. Note that in the OP’s version ‘LINSEDITION.COM’ is displayed in the bottom right, but you’ve cropped it off. Stop doing that.

Stop removing the artist’s tagline.