[Discuss] LLMs and AI

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 2/2/26 4:04 PM, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Feb 2026 18:16:53 -0500
> Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:
>> I think this is a marketing ploy, not a result of Large Language
>> Models. By telling the human how wonderful he or she is, they subtly
>> influence the human to use them more and more. I hear plenty of
> This. As I wrote last week, these chatbots are designed to drive what
> the operators call engagement and I call addictive behavior. It's a
> deliberate design decision, not an intrinsic "feature" of LLM chatbot
> tech.

The main LLM training is enormous and is done on everything they can 
possibly find (the entire internet, every book and newspaper they can 
get a hold of, etc), this creates the generative part of an LLM, and it 
is what gives LLMs their "memorized the manual" knowledge, and their 
generic style of writing.

There is a smaller effort of a secondary, reinforcement training,?it 
teaches what kinds of output are desired (high score) or not desired 
(low score). Unlike the original training, reinforcement training 
requires some external authority to score LLM output, and tell the LLM 
whether humans will like it or not. (I have heard that a separate model 
that has been trained on samples that real humans have scored, is then 
used to teach the LLM in this reinforcement stage. At least that is one 
possible approach. The details here are very proprietary.)

It is this reinforcement training that determines how flattering and how 
engaging the final LLM will be. So yes, those aspects are not a feature 
of the underlying generative model.

-kb