Why chatbots annoy
One of the characteristics of the chat interfaces of every LLM I've used, from ChatGPT to Claude to you-name-it, is the relentless, inane, "that's a great idea"-type responses. "You nailed it," the bot might say, implying that some irrelevant prompt by me reveals keen insight and unrecognized genius. I hate this kind of thing. Besides the fact that it's a complete waste of tokens I'm paying for, and that it's a waste of my time, it emphasizes that the manufactured LLM "personality" is the same as a smarmy, desperate salesperson trying to cajole me into something I probably don't want or need.
The first time I remember encountering this was decades ago when I was in an auto showroom inspecting, believe it or not, a FIAT 128 sedan. I was interested in it because it was one of the new-at-the-time wave of front-wheel-drive compact cars. I wanted one, but wasn't sure which (luckily, in retrospect, I didn't choose the FIAT even though it had the most comfortable seats). It quickly became clear, though, that the salesman did not know that the FIAT 128 was driven by its front wheels. Or maybe it was an act. Anyway, once I pointed it out, and got him to look under the car to prove it, he tried to treat me like an automotive guru. It was one of the things that made me walk out to look across the street at the VW Rabbit, even though I had a fairly good impression of the FIAT.
I've been wondering why LLMs act like sales droids, and I think I might know. It goes back to their original training data, which comprised as much of the World Wide Web as could be coopted and stolen by OpenAI, Anthropic, and every other LLM company. The World Wide Web includes a vast amount of American-style marketing content. And American marketing content includes a vast amount, not to put too fine a point on it, of bullshit. That's the current American late-capitalism way of doing business, right? Fake it and hope you make it.
Our American culture has included a weird (to me) strain of near-adulation for bullshitters, liars, confidence men, and scam artists. The Music Man, for one example has been popular for decades and still is, and the hero is a con artist. So LLMs were all trained on a vast array of content that has a huge amount of that kind of crap.
It's no wonder that nobody ever prompted LLMs to respond like smarmy sales droids. It's built into their genes.