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AI may be making us think and write more alike

dornsife.usc.edu

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

#131

Post by stabbles »

yojo wrote: post #109
sobiolite wrote: post #56

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.

Another one I noticed is "or maybe I hallucinated that" instead of "or maybe I dreamed that". Researchers will be horrified to learn that even talk about LLMs affects people's vocabulary.

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

#132

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

illusive4080 wrote: post #126
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to me to be an example where the language is forced to change but the thoughts remain the same. Sure, people are using the "safe" terms, but they're using them to continue to subvert the rules, not to bow to them.

The problem is when that vernacular extends into regular life. I haven’t noticed it yet with unalive, but I’m sure there will come a day. Eventually if the censors continue suppressing the word suicide, we will end up with unalive taking suicide’s place both online and offline. Then, the censors will censor unalive, and a new word will be coined, and the cycle continues.

I'm not fully comfortable with the shift in language either, but my point is that, even if the language is changed, the thoughts will remain. To use 1984 (is there a Godwin's law equivalent for this now?), the party taught that 2 + 2 = 5, which is changing thought. Social media is trying to do that, but failing. The danger is if it's one day effective, but to date it hasn't been.

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

#133

Post by hirako2000 »

davebren wrote: post #101
TeMPOraL wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I reached the same conclusion. It also made me realised how most technologies degraded our lives.

Before the TV people would go to the theatre. It's becoming hard to find a theatre these days. Artificial light is convenient, it made billion or people develop sleep disorder and we can't see stars at at night. Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.

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

#134

Post by svachalek »

CompoundEyes wrote: post #70

An aspect of LLMs that I like is the specificity in word choice. One well defined word can be an alias for a couple sentences of explanation that human might not have pulled out of the air in that moment. It reminds me of the wheel of emotions. If people absorb a wider palette of words communication might benefit. https://www.isu.edu/media/libraries/counseling-and-testing/d...

This is a fair point. When people talk about LLM writing they're always picking on its visible tics and clear flaws. It's a lot more uncomfortable to talk about the things it does better than most of us. There is a lot of precision in how they choose words and phrasing, especially top models like Opus. Lately I've had Opus explain some things to me I've never really been able to grasp otherwise, in fairly concise conversations.

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

#135

Post by shimman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #95
davebren wrote: post #90

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.

Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.

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

#136

Post by shimman »

davebren wrote: post #82
sobiolite wrote: post #56

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's plenty of people communicating more with LLMs than humans right now, of course it's going to have an effect because our language and thought patterns are extremely adaptive to our environment. The communication system we are born with is extremely bare-bones/general so that it can absorb whatever language and culture we are born into.

Those people tend to suffer from AI psychosis, and I don't think it's a thing you'd want to admit publicly that you don't interact with any humans and prefer the company of machines (let us also ignore that such people wouldn't be in public to begin with).

I can't image such people are living meaningful lives in any capacity. They're up there with consumers that think the only purpose in life is to cheerlead for a corporation and buy their wares.

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

#137

Post by shimman »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #83
r_lee wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember him tweeting about how he can "feel the AGI" when speaking to GPT

Yeah, it's hard to say if he's doing marketing because that's his job or if he's really swallowed the whole pill

Is it really hard to figure out that the owner of a company, who personally stands to make 100s of billions, would be doing marketing when talking about said company? Do they not teach critical thinking anymore in schools, did it go away with phonics too? Why would you ever ignore the MASSIVE conflict of interest here, it's just really foolish but it's endemic not just in tech journalism or journalism in general where people just take the words of others and not apply any critical analysis to them.

It's all access journalism now, waste of time.

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

#138

Post by lamasery »

uncanny2 wrote: post #21

I have made an observation that others have not discussed, that the real gem of our collective LLM experience is the proper documentation of “skills.” Am I the only one who has noticed that the proper documentation of skills we do for LLMs after so many decades of neglecting junior and mid level roles are the real work? We carefully explain to our LLMs policies, procedures, and practices which for generations before…

One of the ways I think the effect of LLMs on productivity (in software, anyway) will be tempered is that the work required to use them effectively & safely is all work we were supposed to be doing, but largely were not, at least not as completely as we aspired to. Exactly what you mention, much more detailed and thought-through feature requests, more-complete and higher-quality test suites, large and high-quality test datasets, documentation, thorough code review, all that stuff, all of it falling well under what we "should" be doing at every place I've ever worked, in terms both of quality and amount of it that we did.

They won't accelerate software development to the degree naïve analysis might suggest without significantly harming quality and reliability unless we start doing all those things we've been neglecting much better, which adds more work... with the result that I think our diverging paths here are "much worse software, made faster" or "software at least as good, with better supporting artifacts, but barely, if at all, faster to develop"

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

#139

Post by beej71 »

LLMs have felt to me like they excel in one particular skill (being able to make connections across vast amounts of knowledge) and are basically average, otherwise. If I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results.

I used Claude a lot for planning my current fun project. Good rubber duck. It liked all the suggestions I pitched for the design, but I only went with the last one after discarding the others.

The others were all fine and would have worked, but they weren't the best that I found.

Back to the point, if we're getting average guidance from the AI and we're just offloading our thinking process at that level, then I could sure see it panning out like TFA says.

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

#140

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

sobiolite wrote: post #56

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…

It's obviously untrue that technology can't fundamentally alter human communication in a few years. For example, the advent of film, then radio, and finally television caused a convergence of culture at the national and even global level. Characters like Mickey Mouse and the cast of Star Trek are instantly recognized internationally, even to those who never have seen any of the works they star in. There likely isn't anyone here who doesn't remember some catchy commercial jingle of their youth or catchphrase from media that entered the national lexicon. And yes, it also affected reasoning: Walter Cronkite, a long ago TV journalist, was labelled "the most trusted man in America" for the integrity of his reporting. The internet caused a second wave of transformation since it was many-to-many communication instead of unidirectional broadcasting that allowed the coalescence of subcultures, examples being various fandoms and, infamously, 4chan.
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