Don't Let the Average Redditor Think for You

"ChatGPT created such a novel idea for me yesterday!"

No, it did not. If you got a new idea, then it was you who created the idea. The LLM helped.

Here is my point: only humans are capable of generating really unique, novel ideas. LLMs only pretend to do this. Think about how an LLM works: the model learned from a giant pile of information — mostly text, whatever is available online: books, articles, Wikipedia, blogs, Reddit posts... actually, lots, lots, LOTS of Reddit posts. So, when the LLM answers you, it predicts the next likely token.

Of course, it's way more complex than that (and you should watch Andrej Karpathy's videos to understand the mechanics), and you can control the way the LLM talks to you by adjusting your prompts and temperature, but in principle, it's all about the next most likely token. And "most likely," statistically, means "what an average Redditor would think about this."

Pause for a moment and imagine an average Reddit thread, and an average response in that thread. Not the most upvoted one! The average reply, the one you won't even scroll to. That's your LLM's judgment.

Now, please don't get me wrong -- I am not anti-LLM. I did run this tip by Claude after I drafted it -- its feedback was actually pretty good. But first, I wrote the tip myself.

Use the LLM as your sounding board, your rubber duck, your critic, your research assistant. But please don't use it to replace something that is only yours -- your creativity.