That was my first thought too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
But it's a pretty amazing rubber duck that has read the entire internet and thus can correlate your ideas with the ideas of all of humanity in a split second on the spot.
However, humans are more nuanced than that. One might remember wrongly, or act in bad-faith. This is why I said "baseline honesty". One people's traits definitely affects how their words are perceived, and this is not carried in the sentence itself.
> I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. ... People can babble too. (Snipped for brevity)
Humans are not as random as an LLM.
> You're not always looking for those in a conversation. Sometimes you really are just checking that you've thought things through.
Again the person you're asking or answering has their own character and their or your words are affected by that implicit knowledge. This is a background process we're not aware of unless you dig into yourself and look for it.
Humans you know and trust, sure. Humans you think you're conversing with online, not so much.
Two decades of experience shows me otherwise. Even your two comments shows a consistent tone. We're just started to discuss, yet I have started to build an image of you thanks to your comments.
This is one of the mechanisms we don't fully understand and don't dare to dig much, because tinkering with people's minds are dangerous.
Humans for sure do not guarantee this either.
I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. It's heard of everything, and it always responds with something that sounds like it came from the same sphere. You have to use your own mind to figure out if it's meaningful, but this is not so different from conversing with a person. People can babble too.
> There are higher orders of information carried implicitly
You're not always looking for those in a conversation. Sometimes you really are just checking that you've thought things through. Like if someone asks you what the arguments in favor of democracy are, you want a list of points so you can check you haven't forgotten something.