First, to get it out of the way: I'm seeing comments here that clearly haven't read the article. I encourage you all to do that.

I feel the article gets it right when suggesting it's the amount of (not always accurate!) data they can throw at you. In an honest discussion there's an assumption that the other person won't straight up lie to me so if someone shows me ten examples for why my argument is wrong I may be inclined to believe them. But if half of those examples are made up, well, that's a different story.

I still think of the commenter here who said "LLMs are a DDOS on free resources" and I feel the comparison works here. If police officers can overwhelm innocent people into confessing, then so can an LLM that "can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are"... convinced.

>In an honest discussion there's an assumption that the other person won't straight up lie

The particular problem with honest discussions is you are the only agent that you can be sure is having one. Honest discussion is formulated on trust and trust, as we are learning, is a very difficult thing to establish. For example, in my view anything involving advertising is likely a lie, or at least likely adversarial to my wishes. On the internet itself conversations are much more likely to drift into the adversarial too. Some of this could just be dialectic, but most often it's emotional investment by the other speaker. Also, even pre-AI the internet is a bullshit generation machine. We take all of our politics, advertising, and human stochastic parrots that are stuck on an infinitely running prompt then bundle up all this data and train AI on it, and wonder why AI acts like us.

The example in the article has another important aspect: The person understood they were arguing with a chatbot but continued anyway.

A lot of internet arguments become about identity politics and supporting the right team, while dismissing any argument from the other side as presumed to have bad intentions. I’ve seen people argue online for things they didn’t really believe, but they didn’t want to give an inch to the other side. Taking up the counter argument is a moral responsibility.

As soon as the other side is revealed as a chatbot that my team versus your team thinking stops playing a role. For us in tech with an understanding of how an LLM reflects its training data and the intentions of its creators not so much, but for the people like the example in this article I imagine it causes them to let their guard down and be open to considering the other side. They can accept the argument without letting someone else win any points.

One of the depressing things about this is that they’ll also confidently repeat a consensus that’s in their training. This is particularly obvious when there’s been a new event just past their training cutoff, and they confidently tell you that can’t be true.

"A DDOS on free resources" is called "moral hazard", AFAIK.