this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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Where was I wrong? I said nothing that contradicts the detail you added.
You can give an LLM the same seed and it will spit out the same word-for-word response. That’s how they work. It’s just a bunch of math.
You're assuming that because I missed out that detail I must be ignorant of it, that's not very charitable, I could well have been ignorant of it but you could have made your otherwise useful clarification without telling me I was wrong.
You said “that’s not how they work”. But that is how they work. Same prompt = same output. Throw some random data in there to jumble things around and you get a little variance. That’s the seed, and we only need to do that because LLMs are inherently deterministic.
Same reason Minecraft has a random seed for world generation, and block cipher algorithms use an initialization vector and/or feedback loop. We don’t want the same thing every time.
I did say that you’re right, because the tooling we use around the LLM itself does exactly what you’re talking about. So, in practice, you’re right.
Again, you're telling me what I already know, because you're still assuming. I can make the point that same prompts don't produce the same output without explaining about random seeds.
I honestly wasn’t trying to attack you. I think we should be careful when we talk about LLMs, because it’s important for people to know that it’s just a bunch of math in a computer program. A lot of people have a tendency to anthropomorphize it.
Yeah. The amount of people that learned about persistent file-based memory and think it’s some indication that the llm they’re promoting is alive, has sentience, or has persistent self-identity and self-awareness instead of recognizing it’s just a way to inject previously learned context when it’s needed without burning tokens sending it with every prompt you send is out of control.
I stumbled across some weird hybrid psychonaut x Claude collab subreddit the other day and holy shit ai psychosis is real.
How did you possibly get that from what I said? Are you purposefully being as uncharitable as possible?
No, I clearly was not talking about this situation. I was clarifying how your interpretation was correct, but you were factually incorrect.
It’s called pedantry, and I have never failed to own it. At this point, I feel like you’re trying to be overly abrasive.
~~Was it not your interpretation that the messages seem to not be from LLMs, because they’re identical? Because that’s literally what you said.~~
Fair enough. Still, why would you misrepresent my view so radically unless you were being uncharitable on purpose?
People confuse LLMs for being non-deterministic all the time. The comment implied that. I want people to understand that LLMs are deterministic, because I don’t want people confusing them with actual intelligence or some sort of “black magic”. But sure man, whatever excuse you need to be an asshole to a stranger.
fuck mate, they said as much