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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

#151

Post by jerf »

exe34 wrote: post #116
jerf wrote: post #115

"say that AI developers should incorporate more real-world diversity into large language model (LLM) training sets," Are you kidding me? How much more "real-world diversity" could they possibly incorporate into the models than the entire freaking Internet and also every scrap of text written on paper the AI companies could get a hold of ? How on Earth could someone think that AIs speak like this because their trainin…

The problem isn't the diversity in the training set - the problem is that the method by design picks the average.

LLM speak isn't even quite the average either. It's something more like the average, then pushed through more training to turn it into the agents we think of today (a fresh-off-the-training-set LLM really is in some sense that "fancy autocomplete" that people called it for a while), then trained by the AI companies to be generally inoffensive and do the other things they want them to do. All of the further actions push the agents away from the original LLM average. The similarity of the "LLM tone" across multiple models and multiple companies, and the fact I don't think this tone has been super directly trained for, strongly suggests that the process of converting the raw LLM into the desirable agents we all use is some sort of strong strange attractor for the LLMs that are pushed through that process.

Maybe they are training for that tone now, either deliberately or accidentally. But my belief that they weren't initially comes from the fact that it's a new tone that I doubt anyone designed with deliberation. It bears strong resemblance to "corporate bland", but it is also clearly distinct from it in that we could all tell those two apart very easily.

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

#152

Post by supliminal »

rdevilla wrote: post #7

This state of affairs presages the advent of a second dark age - one that will forever eclipse the era of radical openness & transparency that once served the software community for decades. Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM whok would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale, until any possible information asymme…

Sounds lifted from Alpha Centauri

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

#153

Post by reaperducer »

davebren wrote: post #90
rdevilla wrote: post #7

This state of affairs presages the advent of a second dark age - one that will forever eclipse the era of radical openness & transparency that once served the software community for decades. Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM whok would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale, until any possible information asymme…

> 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…

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.

Same here.

I no longer post photos, code, or pretty much anything other than short comments on the internet.

I'm not going to do free work for trillion-dollar AI companies.

I do, however, find it interesting to watch AI destroy the whole "content creation" industry.

All of the "creators" and "influencers" and "I wanna be a YouTube star when I grow up" people are all going to have to look for real jobs soon.

I've seen in the newspaper that there are real companies paying real money for fake AI-generated "influencers" to flog their products.

Why pay dollars to a wannabe, when you can pay pennies to an AI corp?

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

#155

Post by dasil003 »

hirako2000 wrote: post #133
davebren wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 70…

I think it's more fair to say that with every technology there are tradeoffs. Consider the wheel, before the wheel people probably were more physically fit, but they couldn't move as large of loads. Well, except in the Andes where they figured out how to move gigantic stones well beyond the weight that any wooden wheel would have been able to carry anyway and cut and place them into configurations that were earthquake resistant.

Technology and civilization is path dependent, and I think it's silly to make blanket statements about the merit of technological progress overall. Everything choice (including the choice to do nothing) has unintended consequences. I would never condemn anyone for inventing a new technological solution to a problem, but once the systematic effects are understood then we do need the collective ability to course correct (eg. social media, AI, etc).

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

#156

Post by jbethune »

Anecdotally I can say this is true both in education and software development. The diversity of approaches and writing styles among junior developers used to be fun to observe and mentor. Now with everyone using AI coding agents there is a same-y-ness to people's work that makes it harder to see what the writer actually knows or doesn't know. A friend of mine who teaches high school English has said the same thing about student work.

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

#157

Post by ge96 »

misterflibble wrote: post #2

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

Man that's so annoying I have a similar problem our devops person I ask question to literally gives me AI responses

Also annoying to me working with a "partner" non-technical they just send me an LLM dump of how to do something

I was trying to explain it to them in an analogy like showing up to a mechanic and telling them what to do based on what ChatGPT said

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

#158

Post by duskdozer »

nidnogg wrote: post #67
aceazzameen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to make some mistakes in your communication (or anything) if you ever want to grow and learn.

You're absolutely right here and things have improved significantly at work after dropping this habit even if slightly.

>You're absolutely right

:|

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

#159

Post by eru »

serhart wrote: post #127
Brendinooo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just trying to be a bit more measured by saying he wasn't so much "opposing" as "articulating pros and cons"? Or are you trying to say that things like "this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves" or "You would imagine that [written speeches] had intelligen…

I'm not who you replied to, but no, no, I don't think that's an "opposition" to writing in the sense that it's making us stupid or replacing oral traditions. From my limited understanding of history and Greek philosophy, Socrates valued dialogue, a "back and forth" for understanding. Basically a scientific method of probing to understand something or someone. This needs to exist to be fully sure you understand someth…

And LLMs get us back to the back and forth dialogue! Plato's sock puppet would be pleased.

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

#160

Post by watwut »

nidnogg wrote: post #61
misterflibble wrote: post #2

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

That is completely opposite of how I use LLM. If I do not have expertise, I ignore LLM and search for more trustworthy resource. LLM lie very confidently and if I do not have expertise, they will lie to me.

When I do have expertise, I use them because I am able to check.

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