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My biggest AI issue? Conversational waste.

My last post talked about how I use AI to help with some Japanese language learning. That process reminded me of one of my biggest nags about it; it always seems to want to start a conversation.

Is that a problem? Context, I suppose, is everything here. I didn't ask Gemini to act like a friend or to try and converse with me. I asked it to help me with my translations. Regardless, every single chat prompt would end with it asking me some sort of follow up question. Most of those didn't even revolve around learning Japanese.

I should be able to specify that I only want it to answer the questions and not provide any follow up or additional conversational elements. And it should listen. I don't agree that it should be the default. 

Now, you might ask, "why is this a problem"? 

Because running AI isn't free. The data centers running these things are power hungry, ecological nightmares. And these LLMs have gotten very good at conversing. But there is no value to having a casual conversation with an LLM when I invoked it to help with my Japanese learning.

Telling Gemini or ChatGPT why I switched to Linux or how good my "hanare" in Kyudo sounds (without using the Kanji or even hiragana) does not achieve the goal I asked it to help me with. Thus, were I to answer, I would simply be helping to fuel the waste produced by these agents. 

And, as I stated above, they are really good at it. That is kind of the point I guess. They want users to like the interactions with the chat bots so that they will continue to use them.

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