The ubiquity of audio commutation technologies, particularly telephone, radio, and TV, have had a significant affect on language. They further spread English around the world making it more accessible and more necessary for lower social and economic classes, they led to the blending of dialects and the death of some smaller regional dialects. They enabled the rapid adoption of new words and concepts.
How will LLMs affect language? Will they further cement English as the world’s dominant language or lead to the adoption of a new lingua franca? Will they be able to adapt to differences in dialects or will they force us to further consolidate how we speak? What about programming languages? Will the model best able to generate usable code determine what language or languages will be used in the future? Thoughts and beliefs generally follow language, at least on the social scale, how will LLM’s affects on language affect how we think and act? What we believe?
Regardless of whether or not something replaces LLMs in the future, the data and processing that’s gone into that data, will likely be used along with the lessons were learning now. I think they’re a solid investment from any angle.
I’m a big proponent of research for the sake of research, so I agree that lessons will be learnt.
But to go back to Ops original question, how will LLMs affect spoken language, they won’t.
But to go back to Ops original question, how will LLMs affect spoken language, they won’t.
That’s a rather closed minded conclusion. It makes it sound like you don’t think they have the chance.
LLMs have the potential to pave the way to aligning spoken language, perhaps even evolving human communication to a point where speech is an occasional thing because it’s really inefficient.
You’re putting the cart very much before the horse here.
For what you describe to happen requires global ubiquity. For ubiquity to happen, it must be something with sufficient utility that people from all walks of time, and in all contexts (ie not just professional) gain value from it.
For that to happen, given the interface is natural language, the LLM must work across languages to a very high level, which works against the idea that human language will adapt to it. To work across language to that level it must adapt to humans, not the other way around.
This is different to other technology which has come before - like post, or email - where a technical restriction in particular format/structure (eg postal or email address) was secondary to the main content (the message).
For LLMs to affect language you’re basically talking about human-to-human communication adopting “prompt engineering” characteristics. I just don’t see this happening on the scale you describe, human-to-human communication is wooly, imperfect, with large non-verbal elements, and while most people make do most of the time, we all broadly speaking suck at making points with perfect clarity and no misunderstanding.
For any LLM to be successful, it must be able to handle that, and being able to handle that dramactically reduces the likelihood of affecting change, because if change is required it won’t be successful.
It’s basically a tautology, is why it’s such a difficult thing, and why our current generation of models are supported mainly through hype and fomo.
Lastly, the closest example to a highly structured prompt that currently exists are programming languages. These are used by millions of people every day, and still developers do not talk to each other via their prefered language’s syntax of choice.
This is interesting and thought provoking discussion, ty.
You’re absolutely right, I was looking for the dead end - plugging LLM into a solution.
I’m more thinking LLMs used in conjunction with other tech will have these effects on our communicating. LLMs, or whatever replaces them to do that interpretation, are necessary to facilitate that.
When we come up with something better, to do the same job better, then of course, LLMs will be redundant. If that happens, great.
We are already seeing a boom in popularity of LLMs outside of professional use. Global ubiquity for anything is never going to happen, unless we can fix communication, which we probably can’t. We certainly can’t alone. It’s very much a chicken an egg problem, that we can only gain from by progressing towards.
Imagining vocallising using programming languages gave me a chuckle. I have been known to do things like use s/x/y/ to correct in written chats though.
Programming languages allow us to talk to and listen to machines. LLMs will hopefully allow machines to listen and talk to/between us.
