Do you start every response off with "that is a great question"? I don't know any human who does. "that is a great question" is reserved either for really hard questions, or sarcasm. The majority of questions are not great, they are just things the asker needs a simple answer.
That's a great question! Ahem.
I remember being advised to do this ~20 years ago when I was going to be answering questions from a group of people. I was told that it's good practice to say something like "that's a great question" every time someone asks anything, as a form of social lubrication, to encourage others to ask questions. I can't say whether it works, and it was advice for a spoken context rather than written, but I don't know how to finish this sentence.
Math professor here.
When I go to research lectures, I sometimes hear that in response to audience questions, although not especially consistently. Some speakers do this more than others, I don't think anyone does it all the time.
It was so long ago that the specifics have faded, but I remember I was coached to use a variety of positive responses. "That's a great question," yes, but also things like "I'm glad you brought that up," and "I was hoping someone would ask about that!" It wasn't my cup of tea, too artificial, but the advice was contemplated.
The next question (which is a great one, from what I understand) is: Why do LLMs use these phrases so much if humans rarely use them in written form? Maybe a fair portion of training data comes from lecture transcripts, where such responses are common when responding to direct questions? And/or system prompts are just instructed to be like that?
> Why do LLMs use these phrases so much if humans rarely use them in written form?
As far as I understand, it's due to RLHF. The reviewers the AI companies use don't necessarily know what kind of question is a good one, so when the LLM answers "That's a good question!", they tend to rate the answer higher because they like being flattered. Proxy models that are themselves trained on RLHF inherit this pattern. Similar effects contribute to sycophancy.[1]
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548
Well before the LLM explosion I would often preface my answers with some form of praise for the question. It depends a lot on audience of course, but it’s amazing how many people tend to perceive direct answers to their questions as negative… and just as amazing how far a little strategic sycophancy goes to temper that. Even though everyone knows it’s half-sincere dead weight.
In a spoken Q&A setting opening every single response with "that's a great question" or "thanks for asking that" or whatever is pretty common as a way to fill a few seconds while you think about your response. This is obviously unnecessary on slack.
I would probably reply with "that is a great question" only as a euphemism for "I don't know"
I have only heard this phrase in american tv shows and movies
People use that too when speaking in real life when they are stalling a bit to conclude their internal thoughts before providing an answer.
work at a crown corp and you'd change your stance on above...