LLMs can't make convincing recommendations on their own.

· Bits and Bobs 3/30/26
  • LLMs can't make convincing recommendations on their own.
    • They lack the lived experience of the real phenomena.
    • Good recommendations must be based on real, situated human decisions and opinions.
    • Review aggregator sites do this, by averaging hundreds of reviews from real people.
      • These averages can be resonant, because they are distilled out of authentic human observations.
    • LLMs can also do this for popular things, by absorbing the observations contained in the writing they were trained on.
      • But novel recommendations are just pattern matching guesses.
      • Hollow.