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AI may be making us think and write more alike

dornsife.usc.edu

71–80 of 271 posts

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#71
post #61

Subtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!

Guilty as charged. In my mind, when I'm insecure about a response or if I don't have enough expertise in the topic at hand I end up running it through an LLM. Lately I've been really trying harder to keep my original ideas as much as possible. I'm seeing a bit of an improvement, but still early to tell

"running it through an LLM" doesn't mean "Give LLM my text -> Copy-paste the output of the LLM" does it? Checking against an LLM then using your own voice feels completely fine, just another type of validation before you share something, but if you actually let the LLM rewrite what you say, then I feel like that's beyond "running it through an LLM", it's basically letting the LLM write your text for you instead of just checking/validating.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#72
post #40

Subtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!

https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/

I've been calling them "meat condoms". In the workplace, it's one or two warnings before completely ejecting them. On social media, instant block.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#73
This is my current fear, even if I choose not to use it if everyone around me does their way of speaking is all going to become more chatbot-esque. It already seems to be transferring to people its false sense of confidence, and its lack of reasoning ability. The corporate demand to participate in this is something I can't do, the cost is our humanity.

I guess one hope for luddites is that we can stay tethered by reading pre-LLM books and other content.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#74

Take a community with AI moderation like Reddit, I've been a participant for years. With the recent push to AI autocorrect and moderation, you can see the changes in language. New words, new ways of speaking, unconsciously editing yourself because you don't want to draw the eye of the bot. It doesn't feel subtle. It feels Orwellian.

It's particularly egregious on youtube, where people frequently use words like "unalived" or "self-deleted" instead of murder or suicide, lest they incur the wrath of the almighty algorithm.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#75

English is not my first language, but when I started using Firefox with the built-in spell correction, I firmly believe my ability to spell words went drastically up. My grammar is stiff iffy, like I'm pretty sure I do comma splices everywhere, but at least most people can understand what I say now compared to when I was 13 and on the internet. If there was a "gramma nazi" teenie tiny LLM with a total focus on Englis…

Some play this everyday, as vocabulary will improve in time =3

https://play.freerice.com

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#76
On a creative level, I remember McCarthy describing scalped heads as like wet polyps blue in the moonlight. The more generic ways of describing something like that would never give me such a visceral reaction to the violence he was trying to tell me something about.

I already lose interest reading books where the phrases are recycled and the max sentencelength for the whole book grazes 40.

If people communicate to me without personality through prompt wastrelry I'll discount theirs and wait till they're willing to actually have an opinion. In this specific context style and substance tend to come in a pair or not at all. If you can't beat 'em you can at least filter 'em out.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#77

Human communication and reasoning is the end result of billions of years of evolution. I'd be very surprised if LLMs can fundamentally alter it in a few years. When considering phenomenon like these, I think people seriously underestimate what I'd call the "fashion effect". When a new technology, medium or aesthetic appears, it can have a surprisingly rapid influence on behaviour and discourse. The human social brain…

>But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity

The internet didn't follow this trajectory. Neither did smart phones.

Surprise, surprise, it's the same people trying to make AI entrenched into our society.

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