It acts as an abstraction mechanism for you to extend and interact with your own recursive dialogic cognition made outwardly manifest and reflected back at you, through the words of an LLM. That’s why it “tells people what they want to hear.”
Here’s a metaphor, when I have an itchy red bump on my head what I do is I take a photo of it with my phone, which I can then zoom-in on, share with others for feedback, etc. It’s me using the mediums of a mobile phone camera, the internet, LLM’s to be able to abstract the internal question I have about what this itchy red bump is and then collect a bunch of extra insight that I can work with It’s like how a math problem can be decomposed into an entirely different system like DNA, where a computation can take place in a vastly quicker amount of time and then it can be put back into a valid mathematical composite.
If you compare my chats and discussions with someone else’s, you will see VERY different things. Not because the model is different, but because the organic sentience being abstracted through the mirror of the LLM and refracted back, is.
That’s my working thoughtform of what this all is, at this time.
You might enjoy my preprint, it’s somewhat related. Check it out… OSF