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
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?
Jup, most definitely!
I’d much rather have just one unhinged uncle at St. Martin’s Day than having everybody come off as the unhinged uncle by lack of supervision of the LLMs talking in your place, making it seem like being unhinged is normal and thereby creating artificial peer pressure in a truly wicked exercise of laziness.
I figure they can either help or harm, depending on implementation:
Huggingface ( I always think of the “face-huggers” in Alien, when I see that name… and have NO idea why they thought that association would be a Good Thing™ ) has a LLM which apparently can do Sanskrit.
Consider, though:
All the Indigenous languages, where we’ve only actually got a partial-record of the language, and the “majority rule, minority extinguishes” “answer” of our normal process … obliterated all native speakers of that language ( partly through things like residential-schools, etc )…
now it becomes possible to have an LLM for that specific language, & to study the language, even though we’ve only got a piece of it.
This is like how we’ve sooo butchered the ecology that we can only study pieces of it, now, there’s simply too-much missing from what was there a few centuries ago, so we’re not looking at the origina/proper thing, either in ecologies or in languages.
sigh
This wasn’t supposed to be depressing.
Consider how search-engines have altered how we have to communicate…
In order to FORCE a search-engine to consider a pair-of-words to be a single-term, you have to remove all intervening space/hyphens/symbols from between them.
ClimatePunctuation is a single search-token, but “Climate Punctuation” is two separate, unrelated terms, which may or may-not appear in the results.
It’s obscene.
I’m almost mad-enough to want legislation forcing search-engines to respect some kind of standard set of defaults ( add more terms == narrowing the search, ie defaulting to Boolean AND, as one example ),
so they’d stop enshittifying our lives while “pretending” that they’re helping.
( there was a Science news site which would not permit narrowing-of-search, and I hope they fscking died.
Making search unusable on a science site??
probably some “charity” who pays most of their annual-budget to their administration, & only exists for their entitlement.
I’m saying that after having encountered that religion in charities. )
Interesting:
search-engines alter our use-of-language,
social-sites do too,
LLM’s do too,
marketing/propaganda does,
astroturfing does,
… it begins looking like real events are … rather-insignificant … influences in our languages?
Hm…
