I imagine an LLM that has more realtime capabilities and can respond (or tell you what to say) on the fly would be a more fascinating conversation partner (well, on the surface!) than what you're depicting: a person who'd stop a conversation to ask the phone, and then just read the LLM's response.

I've read that interviews with Stephen Hawking are excruciating because he'd take many minutes to "type" up his response. Of course people are still engaged because it's Hawking and the answer is from his brain, someone pausing to interact with an LLM would be a bore indeed.

I think you're failing to understand that the human part of conversations is what makes them worthwhile. Otherwise you might as well just be talking by yourself to a circuit board.

Well duh... what I'm portraying is someone faking a human conversation, but who's actually just an output device for an LLM. A bit like pick-up artists going through a routine. What you're portraying is someone reciting Wikipedia, which would obviously be dull. And from that you're extrapolating that someone robotically reciting what an LLM is whispering would also be dull.

What I'm saying is, have a little bit more imagination and imagine someone seemingly in natural conversation, who is actually an LLM. Could they be engaging? IMO quite a bit more engaging compared to someone reading Wikipedia out loud. Would it be artificial? It still is. But would the conversation partner notice? Maybe not for a while. Would I hate it? Of course...

This idea has been explored before.

For example, a man had an AI girlfriend in a movie and she hired someone to keep her in her ear and follow instructions on what to say and do, so that she could be physically intimate with her human by borrowing someone’s body. Stuff like this could be interesting, people acting as surrogates for AI or just using AI to augment their conversation skills.