But the relief when I admitted to somebody that I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the flip side of that? You can throw anything at an LLM, and there\u2019s no one there to judge you. Is there an upshot, where maybe some really unorthodox ideas come out of asking questions of LLMs?<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019ve heard that an LLM can be a thought partner \u2014 a \u201cthought partner\u201d in quotes. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n That\u2019s for an expert-level user. You have to understand enough to know when you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n Why don\u2019t you use LLMs that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ll just come clean with you and tell you that I have enough objections that I\u2019ve never typed anything into Claude or ChatGPT. So I\u2019m in a very weird space, personally, with this.<\/p>\n As a chair of a department, as a director of graduate student research, somebody who\u2019s 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\u2019m consuming a lot of content and reading a lot of papers.<\/p>\n My group is involved in the Genesis Mission, so we have funding for Mu2e for experimenting with AI agents. You could say we\u2019re on the bleeding edge; we\u2019re doing all these things. So I don\u2019t want to make it seem as if in terms of physics research, we\u2019re Luddites. I would say we\u2019re the opposite. We\u2019re trying to push as much as we can.<\/p>\n 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\u2019m not in a position to use it in that way, those LLM prompts are not solving my problems right now.<\/p>\n In my personal life, I have not opened up the prompt. An LLM is not writing my emails; it\u2019s not planning my vacations. Why are some emails difficult to write? Because I\u2019m navigating something that\u2019s 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\u2019t find that a time-saver.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re not going to get those emails from people who came across something in our book and want to have a conversation. And that\u2019s a conversation where I can learn, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But the relief when I admitted to somebody that I didn\u2019t know something was palpable. It was amazing.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[271],"tags":[18,19,17,452,133],"class_list":["post-672068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-physics","tag-science"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117212334446938781","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}