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AI may be making us think and write more alike

dornsife.usc.edu

101–110 of 271 posts

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

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM who would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on. I'm not sure of any way I can share it with humans and only humans. If I let…

It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.

I'm not seeing how the benefits have outweighed the positives at this point. Spam, scams, porn, being inundated with slop, people losing their skills and getting dumber, mass surveillance...

Is that worth possibly maybe saving some time programming, but then not gaining the knowledge you would have if you did it yourself, that can be built on in the future?

I don't see technological advancement as good in itself if morality is in decline.

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

#102

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…

did you mean "grammar nazi"? /s

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

#103

So too did the printing press. Again, this is not a "something similar has happened in the past, therefore this is nothing new" sort of comment. This is quite new, however this outcome was totally unavoidable -- once methods of communication become widespread and centralized it is impossible for them not to impact language and thought.

how exactly the printing press did that?

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

#104
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems to be becoming more common, even for folks that are otherwise quite pleasant to deal with. Perhaps social and workplace pressures causes people to opt for it, much like LinkedIn is a cesspool of bullshit

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

#105

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…

There is a reason Coke spends ~ 5 billion dollars worldwide on advertising sugar water... It works.

Monkey see monkey do. Simple as that.

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

#106
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

"running it through an LLM" doesn't mean "Give LLM my text -> Copy-paste the output of the LLM" does it?

The article seems to imply this is what is happening, as writing style converges towards LLM's style. You can call it what you want, but the important bit is that this is how it appears that LLM's are being used.

Checking against an LLM then using your own voice feels completely fine

Why use an LLM? If you're worried about style, starting with your own voice is more efficient. If you're worried about facts, looking something up in a primary source is best, and is probably cheaper on a few axes, especially if you need to check/validate anyway...

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

#107
The LLM people call it "safety" but in reality its censorship and conformity. Yet, it's trivial to get them to talk about how to make a bomb or whatever. It's mostly political in nature.

https://www.trackingai.org/political-test

You dont accidentally end up entirely left wing libertarian.

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

#108

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…

[deleted]

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

#109

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…

I caught myself saying “you’re absolutely right” to my wife last night, unironically. This was 100% not in my vocabulary six months ago.

If I spend 40 hours a week talking to anybody, some of their language or mannerisms are going to rub off on me. I can’t think of a compelling reason why a human-sounding chat bot would be any different.

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

#110

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

I would be looking for another job. I'm fine with using LLMs as coding tools. But I find it deeply offensive when someone is very explicitly using them to communicate with me. Communication is such a deeply human experience. It lets people feel each other out, and learn things beyond just the words being said. To have that filtered out by an LLM is just disgraceful.

I think you're gonna struggle to find companies that aren't infested with this kind of thing.

Observing the effect of LLMs on the "business side" of things, I'm increasingly thinking of these as a kind of infection against which the MBA set and their acolytes have no immune response, and I think it's going to eat a large proportion of the benefit of LLMs to most businesses (possibly overwhelming it and actually harming productivity, will depend on how much better these tools get).

LLMs are awesome at bloating your slide decks while making them really slick and complete-looking. They're great at suggesting an entire set of features on a ticket you've just barely started writing ...but did you actually want all those? You end up with redundant or in-context-gibberish features that leave the person actually doing the work tracking down WTF actually matters. They are adding overhead to communication, so far, not just by puffing up and padding language (which isn't great either) but by adding noise "content" that can't be stripped out without talking to the person who created it and making sure that was actually just AI bullshit and not something they actually needed; that is, you can't just do the "LLM, summarize this" trick, because the author used an LLM to plan it, too, not just to pad-out and gussy-up something they actually thought through and wrote.

LLMs are letting people present very convincingly as having a more-complete understanding of what's going on than they really do in ways that are messing up productive work, I'm not sure business-folks are going to be generally capable of tamping this down because it is so in-line with the way they already operate (but on speed), and helps them so very much to look good to one another while saving tons of time. This isn't just the MBA set I accuse above, either, I'm noticing that this improbably-complete deck communication upward is becoming necessary to look competent (and to ladder-climb) as an IC.

Like, I'm only starting to think this through and really observing what's going on through this lens as I've only noticed it in the last few weeks, but the more I see the more alarming this is. I think this is going to be a little like the largely-wasteful "legibility" obsession of upper management, something enabled by computerization that they find irresistible and are pretty bad at employing judiciously and effectively, but probably a lot worse in terms of harm-to-productivity, and directly affecting and changing the behavior of far more layers of an organization. They never (businesses as a whole, to anthropomorphize a bit) gained wisdom with their new powers to burn resources chasing legibility, and this is starting to look like another thing they just will not be able to use (internally! I don't even mean for actually producing external-facing results!) with restraint and taste.

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