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?
It’ll be interesting to see how it affects the average person’s written communication. When we know technology can handle something for us, our brains seem to let it carry the load. Think of all the people who aren’t great communicators or might not be confident in their English who would love to rely on this already.
I guess it’s a matter of perspective whether you view it as a crutch or a boon, which I’m sure has been a conversation about many pieces of technology over the years:
People were better at remembering phone numbers before cell phones stored them. People were better at remembering how to spell words before spell check/autocorrect. People were better at writing by hand before typewriters/keyboards. etc
People who rely too heavily on autocorrect do already now cause misunderstandings by writing something they did not intend to.
I had a friend during uni who was dyslectic, and while the words in his messages were written proper you still had to guess the context from the randomly thrown together words he presented you with.
Now that we can correct not only a single word or roughly the structure of a sentence, but instead fabricate whole paragraphs and articles by providing a single sentence, I imagine we will see a stark increase in low-quality content, accidental false information, and easily preventable misunderstandings - More than we already have.
Damn. I hadn’t made that connection yet, that’s actually quite worrying.
If reliance on LLMs does begin to affect language skills negatively, it could become a significant problem. Let alone the political implications, I believe that people are more capable of navigating personal relationships when they have a strong command of language.
Each generation thinks they had it the right way and younger ones have it easy. You can go back centuries with people pushing each other down.
What should be encouraged is the exchange of ideas and healthy debate. Words are just a tool for that, and spelling and grammar and " not knowing Latin" are components of it.
A couple generations down the road we would be able to accurately transmit our thoughts to other people and calibrate for their culture and growing up biases, and the generation immediately before it will whine when LLM was the right way to communicate.
Eh, LLMs do have a significant problem in how they can generate false information by themselves. Every other tool prior requires a person to make said false information, but LLMs can just generate it when asked a question
So what’s your point, should we trust machines less than the unhinged uncle at Thanksgiving?
Maybe they’ll help people sort out the difference between “affect” and “effect”.
On the contrary, AI will have been trained on so much bad grammar that it will become even more ingrained into society.
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What causes the loss of a local variety (dialect or language) is not simply exposure to other varieties, but the loss of the identity associated with said variety. In other words, what led to the blending and death of those dialects wasn’t the audio communication technology - it’s economical, social, and ideological pressures, such as nationalism.
I’ll exemplify this using rhoticity in England. If telephone, radio and TV led to blending and death of dialects, you’d expect rhoticity in England to increase, due to exposure to American media. It didn’t - it’s decreasing:
Source for the map: it’s a collation of both maps in this article. The reason for the shift however becomes obvious when you look at identity matters: “you’re a Brit, speak like a Brit”.
The exact same reasoning applies to other languages, by the way. Caipira Portuguese features aren’t being replaced with the ones from that weird Globo TV accent, but with the ones spoken in São Paulo city; sheísmo in Argentina seems to be spreading, regardless of media from other countries; Occitan was not killed in France by simply exposing kids to French, but by making them feel ashamed of speaking Occitan.
With that out of the way, it’s hard to predict the future impact of machine text generation, be it through LLMs or better models. It’s perfectly possible that this sort of tech helps the preservation of local varieties, as LLMs are kind of good at translation; for example, I’ve noticed that Gemini is able to parse Venetian, even if unable to answer in the language.
We’ll never ever start a phrase with “Certainly…” anymore
I will share a journal entry from when I was mulling this over last December. Interested in your thoughts:
In old media, such as books and movies, we passively receive the media. We hear stories of heroes, songs about how the singer feels, written thoughts from inside another writer’s mind. These are valuable because of how we connect with others and thereby grow.
Interactive media, e.g. video games, allow us to tinker with a story and interrogate our relationship and attitude towards the ideas and themes thereby. We pull a lever, and the story changes direction. Video games have become such a large industry thanks to the more profound personal connection we can develop with the art through prescribed mechanical interactions. We press the buttons, and become the hero.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, it won’t be long before someone invents a new form of storytelling predicated on this technology. While we used to read stories, it now becomes possible for stories to be read into us. An AI can now be created that observes your life, and makes sense of it in a profound larger context.
This new media would be an AI companion who acts as a fourth wall of your life; layering your struggles and triumphs within a larger context, lightly editorializing, adding soundtracks that seamlessly portray your energy and emotional state (or humorously juxtapose it), adding humorous asides or callbacks that keep you in the moment, gently reminding and prompting next activities, reflecting on failures or calling attention to bad habits one is trying to break, and generally contriving to elevate the daily experience to the level of storytelling. It would give life an enhanced sense of meaningful examination, refining our sense of self and bringing our life into focus. This is a form of media that is not itself passively received, but actively treats your life as a fully interactive lived experience.
Art is integral to our ability to relate to others, experience things that are larger than ourselves, and to create meaning. This “fourth wall” AI would be a new form of media that seeks to amplify our understanding of ourselves, integrating our egos with our life as it exists as we change and grow throughout life.
The risks posed by malfeasant propagation of such a medium are at once beyond imagining and entirely predictable; the manufacturing of consent, the corrupting influence of profit motives, and the use of media as a social control mechanism are all pre-21st century concepts in media.
Whether a “fourth wall AI” represents a new threat or merely a quantum leap in the scale of preexisting threats cannot be known in advance. All of the above is to merely assert that we will see, and that such a medium could theoretically be used as art in the true sense, if such technology can be put in the hands of artists, and not just corporations.
This is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time. The potential in either direction is immense, imagine having a soundtrack to daily life tailored to what is happening? Would you hear boss music if you mess up at work/school/etc?
How is this viewed by the user is a good question as well. If it’s broadcast on a speaker/projector that everyone else can see what the ai is showing us as well. If it’s only viewable to us by either implants or some sort of smart glass technology then it’s “private” to the user.
Like you mention, the potential abuse of this system is unimaginable. Ads shown directly in our vision, a paid tier that is ad free. Music is shown to be able to effect emotional state easily (movies as an example), what if the soundtrack is used to emphasize certain goals. The ai pushes you to buy a certain car brand over another because said car brand paid the ai company more.
As McLuhan said, the medium is the message. If this is a story AI is telling about you to you, then it would probably best be a purely private experience happening in headphones or around the house. If this is a story where you are woven into the world as a character in other peoples’ lives, it should be happening around you. In cinematic storytelling we talk about whether something is “diegetic”; is the soundtrack coming from something in the world, or is it something only the audience can perceive as part of a constructed experience? If the goal of a “fourth wall AI” (should be in my opinion) to make your perception of yourself more fully unified with the world around you, I’d advocate for these things to be realized ‘diegetically’, so that multiple fourth-wall AI would have to work together to create harmony in the reality they construct for their audiences. I think on a more sociological level, I am worried about how much we each feel separate and different from one another in society. I think that having the fourth wall AI be strictly a public phenomenon would be a better choice not just from an artistic perspective, but from a sense of its potential for reinforcing our social fabric.
This is a really interesting, thoughtful comment (and exactly why I love lemmy).
I don’t know if it’s just my lack of imagination, but I find your description of AI pet/companion as an art/media object much more plausible and interesting rather than when people discuss their possible sentience. It really doesn’t seem to many steps from Spotify’s discovery weekly playlist or Google Assistant reading all my emails, when combined with LLM capacity to plausibly bullshit, to having a ‘virtual friend’ who texts me jokes, questions and what not.
Especially since we’ve both normalised interacting with humans in entirely digital ways & created a massive corpus of how humans interact via social media archives. Why do I want a calendar app pinging me a notification when I could have a virtual companion message me “I hope your haircut goes well this afternoon, looking forward to seeing your new look!” or “don’t fucking forget your appointment again you dumbass” depending on what companion I purchased.
Given many people’s preference to “get everything in one place”, it seems likely that instead of newsletters, comedy subs or travel updates, we’ll just have different imaginary friends sending us the stuff we need/want to know, mixed in with our actual friends. Some of whom might as well be virtual since we never see them in the flesh.
