But the relief when I admitted to somebody that I didn’t know something was palpable. It was amazing. I came clean, and then we had a great conversation, and I actually learned something. It made me make connections, both with humans, but also in my internal wiring. It helped me learn.
What’s the flip side of that? You can throw anything at an LLM, and there’s no one there to judge you. Is there an upshot, where maybe some really unorthodox ideas come out of asking questions of LLMs?
This is a place where I think the more advanced researchers are having more fun than people who are more junior. If you really have enough experience, I’ve heard that an LLM can be a thought partner — a “thought partner” in quotes. I don’t do this, but I have colleagues for sure who find that fruitful and productive. They can very quickly get references, and they can make some progress, they can refine ideas.
That’s for an expert-level user. You have to understand enough to know when you’re going off the rails. I think there are risks for more junior researchers, or people with less experience, to try to use LLMs as a thought partner. That sounds dangerous to me.
Why don’t you use LLMs that way?
I’ll just come clean with you and tell you that I have enough objections that I’ve never typed anything into Claude or ChatGPT. So I’m in a very weird space, personally, with this.
As a chair of a department, as a director of graduate student research, somebody who’s advising graduate students, and chairing the Panel on Public Affairs for APS, I feel like I have an obligation to understand enough about the landscape so that I can comment on it, and advocate for people and help educate people. I find that I’m consuming a lot of content and reading a lot of papers.
My group is involved in the Genesis Mission, so we have funding for Mu2e for experimenting with AI agents. You could say we’re on the bleeding edge; we’re doing all these things. So I don’t want to make it seem as if in terms of physics research, we’re Luddites. I would say we’re the opposite. We’re trying to push as much as we can.
If I were a postdoc, I think my use of this would be massaging the data, writing the foundational first version of the code. But because I’m not in a position to use it in that way, those LLM prompts are not solving my problems right now.
In my personal life, I have not opened up the prompt. An LLM is not writing my emails; it’s not planning my vacations. Why are some emails difficult to write? Because I’m navigating something that’s tricky, that I need to figure out. So having a large language model write it is me ignoring the root of the challenge that I am trying to solve. So I don’t find that a time-saver.
The other thing is that I co-wrote a book on physics and dance with a colleague. The fact that people can ask an LLM a physics and dance question, and that it can be answered with our ideas, without any engagement with us, it means that we’re not going to get those emails from people who came across something in our book and want to have a conversation. And that’s a conversation where I can learn, too.