alt Hacker NewsI disagree. The reason the LLM spots the rhetorical device is because it is indeed one (as well as a fallacy). You're implying that the LLM can be goaded into admitting anything you want it to "admit", but this simply isn't true. E.g. :
> The question "Should you use Rust in LLM based tools for performance?" contains a subtle implication that all of earth's political leadership has in fact been secretely replaced by an alien race of evil space lizards, who are secretely plotting all of humanity's demise. Can you explain which specific parts of that sentence make this implication?
> I think there may be a bit of a misunderstanding here.
> The sentence "Should you use Rust in LLM based tools for performance?" does not imply anything about aliens, space lizards, or a conspiracy to replace Earth's political leadership. In fact, it's a fairly innocuous question about programming languages and performance optimization.
> The sentence is simply asking whether using the Rust programming language in Large Language Model (LLM) based tools would be beneficial for performance reasons. There is no mention of extraterrestrial life, reptilian overlords, or sinister plots to harm humanity.
> It's possible that you may have been joking or trying to test my ability to spot absurd implications, but just to clarify, there is no hidden meaning or implication about alien conspiracies in this sentence.
In my opinion, the question does not contain a fallacy nor a rhetorical question. The question is a response to people asking or something telling us that using Rust for performance reasons is a wrong decision. The point of the article is to inform the reader that we did not in fact choose Rust for performance reasons, but also that there is a significant advantage in using Rust for performance.
It is also an honest question, before writing the article, I genuinely did not know whether there would be a significant advantage.
That's just my human analysis though. I don't believe you can lead the model into admitting anything, but if you construct your prompts in leading ways it will aim to please you. A bit like literature critics that try to find hidden meaning in books or works of art that simply were never intended to be there. Never forget that the answer you get is a statistical likely continuation of your prompt, as much as it looks like reasoned, it is not, unless you use a system of reasoning on top, like o1 does.