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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

#191

Post by BoneShard »

RobotToaster wrote: post #74
jeffwask wrote: post #62

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.

Youtube comments is a separate genre itself. Due to youtube moderation policy - music video comments are all the same, same tired jokes, patterns. Not an AI slop per se, but feels the same.

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

#192

Post by kjkjadksj »

lamasery wrote: post #122
giancarlostoro wrote: post #65

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…

A ton of "incorrect" comma usage isn't even (historically) wrong, actually, it's just currently unfashionable. There was a reaction in the last century against poor writers with poor taste over-using punctuation and writing ugly, long sentences. The result was stern advice to students to eliminate punctuation and cut sentences up into tiny bits. These same students came out of this process believing this was correct…

Anyone who reads hemingway in 2026 would not struggle with literacy as an adult.

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

#193

Post by nayuki »

> AI may be making us think and write more alike

Many technologies have been doing that for centuries. For example: The printing press making books available to the masses, standardized spelling in English (it was a mess before!), radio and TV broadcasting speech thus creating more uniform accents nationwide, the Internet spreading all kinds of information globally instantly, even memes (literally thinking and writing alike).

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

#194

Post by crooked-v »

lamasery wrote: post #122
giancarlostoro wrote: post #65

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…

A ton of "incorrect" comma usage isn't even (historically) wrong, actually, it's just currently unfashionable. There was a reaction in the last century against poor writers with poor taste over-using punctuation and writing ugly, long sentences. The result was stern advice to students to eliminate punctuation and cut sentences up into tiny bits. These same students came out of this process believing this was correct…

> stunted literacy

I think that's got more to do with schools just literally not teaching students to read in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_cueing

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

#195

Post by gabbagool »

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…

The first thing I thought when I read the abstract of the underlying paper was that this sounds like "model collapse" at the society level.

I don't feel super confident that we'll "soon" find ourselves in a world where there is no variance left in thought (would that be the net effect of total model/epistemic collapse?), though if you do accept that there could be any loss of variance due to AI, perhaps it's not unreasonable to consider how much and how quickly could this happen?

All this is by way of saying, I don't think it's wrong to ask these kinds of questions and think deeply about the consequences of societal shifts like this.

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

#196

Post by tines »

nayuki wrote: post #193

> AI may be making us think and write more alike Many technologies have been doing that for centuries. For example: The printing press making books available to the masses, standardized spelling in English (it was a mess before!), radio and TV broadcasting speech thus creating more uniform accents nationwide, the Internet spreading all kinds of information globally instantly, even memes (literally thinking and writin…

Yeah, that doesn't mean it's not a bad thing.

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

#197

Post by pdimitar »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #190
pdimitar wrote: post #113

While I cringe at most LLM speak, I have learned quite a bit from it. Certain terminology and some gaps in my entirely self-learned English. I appreciate that. It helped me better express myself at work and use less words (but hopefully more substantive ones). But yeah, their general tone is very... castrated. Safe. Hugely impersonal. I have learned to quickly edit out their suggested comments when I ask for an advic…

You would have been better off reading good english literature to improve your own writing.

I can't turn back the clock and I will have to relay to my family that this month I'll get less money because I need to read English literature.

We operate within our own time and energy budgets, man. I might never get to that literature. My peaceful times in life where I could chill and choose what to do are over and I don't expect them to ever come back. Though who knows.

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

#198

Post by djeastm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #186
mountainb wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be bad? Why is more better?

Would you ask that your starving great-n-grandparents worried about whether they're able to feed the infant that would later become your ancestor?

Isn't that a food distribution problem not a food production one?

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

#199

Post by djeastm »

bitwize wrote: post #172
azan_ wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Europe did not have dark ages, it only had period of population decline, of less emissions, less building, less inventions, less records and severed trade networks.

Population decline? Less emissions? Haven't we reached consensus that those would be welcome today? Is it time for a pro-dark-age movement?

The world is projected to hit population decline already sometime between 2060 and 2080, so I guess the younger ones of us will find out definitively whether it's a good or bad thing.

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

#200

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

2dfdxf wrote: post #173
beej71 wrote: post #139

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 du…

Agreed. The test I run is "Can it simplify a concept I know in a matter of sentences/words, better than I can?" on a subject area that requires a lot of nuance. And to my disappointment, the LLMs never come close. They dump paragraphs upon paragraphs. I actually want to see the LLMs surprise me. But they disappoint me for what Im specifically looking for.

Hm I gave the prompt:

> Summarize a technique for type erasure as is done in C++. Assume that your audience is familiar with all of C++'s features, but not with the technique of type erasure. The briefer the summary, the better, but don't omit any essential pieces or use vague language.

ChatGPT Plus generated a lot of text and code. Then I said:

> Now please summarize using only a few sentences.

and it replied:

> Type erasure wraps any concrete type `T` in a uniform container that stores a `void*` to the object plus a pointer to a type-specific static table of function pointers (the “vtable”). Each `T` provides its own table implementing required operations (destroy, copy/move, and any interface methods), and the container dispatches all behavior through that table. This lets unrelated types share a runtime interface without a common base class, with lifetime and semantics fully defined by the per-type table.

Not perfect, but pretty good.

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