9 ms·
AI may be making us think and write more alike
- misterflibble 7mo agoSubtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!
- ModernMech 7mo agoAI doesn't have to be conscious or sentient to take over, all that needs to happen is for politicians, law enforcement, journalists, educators etc. to uncritically parrot everything it outputs. The military is already using AI to make targeting decisions. If they just go with whatever the AI says to strike, then AI is already fighting our wars.
- trollbridge 7mo agoAs a bonus, mistakes can be blamed on AI.
- krige 7mo agoFor many that's not a bonus, that's the goal. Consequence-free life ahoy.
- pixl97 7mo agoFun and games until the AI decides extincting us is worth it.
- bluefirebrand 7mo agoUnfortunately you can really tell which people haven't seriously considered that possibility or seriously don't care if it happens
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- misterflibble 7mo agoThe scary thing is that AI decision making has been infiltrating society for decades as an unseen entity.
- jerrygarcia 7mo agoI often wonder if the popularity of LLMs among company executives is that they are the perfect yes men. They rarely disagree with any idea or proposal, providing a salve for the insecurities of their users.
- davebren 7mo agoI was listening to one of Altman's more recent interviews and it sounded like he himself has LLM induced psychosis.
- r_lee 7mo agoI remember him tweeting about how he can "feel the AGI" when speaking to GPT
- bluefirebrand 7mo agoYeah, it's hard to say if he's doing marketing because that's his job or if he's really swallowed the whole pill
- shimman 7mo agoIs 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.
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago> 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 The question isn't about what action he's taking, it's about what motivates him under the surface. Obviously what he is doing is marketing. What I'm curious about is whether he truly believes his own marketing or if he is just doing it because its his job
- MattGaiser 7mo agoAnd I would bet he judges your work with AI, assigns you work generated by AI, and perhaps evaluates whether you yourself use enough AI.
- misterflibble 7mo agoThat's exactly what he does...wtf are you spying on me?? Lol but seriously, I don't know how to handle his AI delegation
- eru 7mo agoWell, has it been an improvement?
- misterflibble 7mo agoNo that's why I'm complaining
- tcp_handshaker 7mo agoHave you tried to prompt inject your team leader? It works wonderfully with mine.
- SecretDreams 7mo agoI 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.
- misterflibble 7mo agoYes exactly and I am actively applying for jobs. But I feel like the next job will also have this nonsense behaviour
- sumeno 7mo agoGood luck finding a company that doesn't have these people if LLMs are used
- misterflibble 7mo agoYes true! It's everywhere now!
- lamasery 7mo agoI 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.
- beached_whale 7mo agoThis is one of my fears with this, losing ones voice. Everyone's expression distilled to the mean. This has ramifications in things like recognizing if a person is who they say they are too. At least currently, it is punished/shunned to sound like an LLM, but it's well within reason to see that shift to individuality being penalized.
- misterflibble 7mo agoI think corporations will start penalizing first, they're already doing that to some extent at my work because they want their in-house agents to only review our PRs.
- nusl 7mo agohttps://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/ https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/
- thatjoeoverthr 7mo agoI've been calling them "meat condoms". In the workplace, it's one or two warnings before completely ejecting them. On social media, instant block.
- nusl 7mo agoSeems 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
- misterflibble 7mo agoThat's terrific lol thanks for the link BTW!
- Izkata 7mo ago> > The experience is strange; you aren't able to grasp any common human aspects because there are none. You can't reason with the human, because the human isn't doing the reasoning. You can't appeal to it, because the LLM behind it is in direct support of its own and the proxy's opinions and whims. I've sometimes wondered if the chat context is why some people think LLMs are intelligent, it being divorced from their usual experiences, and they need something like this to feel the cognitive dissonance before they can notice LLM shortcomings.
- avaer 7mo agoJust because thoughts are translated doesn't mean they are consumed in the process. However I don't doubt many "team leaders" can and should be replaced with LLMs.
- nidnogg 7mo agoGuilty 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
- aceazzameen 7mo agoYou have to make some mistakes in your communication (or anything) if you ever want to grow and learn.
- nidnogg 7mo agoYou're absolutely right here and things have improved significantly at work after dropping this habit even if slightly.
- duskdozer 7mo ago>You're absolutely right :|
- misterflibble 7mo agoLol that triggered me too!
- embedding-shape 7mo ago"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.
- misterflibble 7mo ago
- ge96 7mo agoMan 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
- oddsockmachine 7mo agoI'm dealing with the same nonsense. I get LLM-generated reviews of my work, documents, and plans which are not grounded in reality or nuance. Regularly have to explain why the AI is wrong. I was told I should run my docs through the LLM to make them read better. But they're not even being read by humans at this point.
- adriand 7mo agoI always wonder if competitive market dynamics will solve problems like these, at least to some extent and for some people, because the people who retain the ability to communicate in a distinctive, persuasive and original style will be rewarded. Corporate dronespeak is no less homogeneous than AI writing, and companies with this communication style are regularly disrupted by nimbler, more authentic-sounding competitors.
- alexchantavy 7mo agoI sure hope so. The way companies are pressured to hit growth numbers, I really hope messaging in general doesn’t all get sloppified along with code lol. I think AI writing makes humanities and writing courses more important, and I hope people maintain their sense of taste with writing, but tbh I’m not optimistic here.
- downboots 7mo agoIt's not explanation — it's relabeling. Why it matters:
- oceansky 7mo agoWasted the opportunity of using an em dash instead of an en dash in the title.
- rdevilla 7mo agoThis 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 asymmetries have been arbitraged away. The development & secrecy of technique will once again become a deep moat as LLMs fall into local, suboptimal minima, trained on and marketed towards the lowest common denominator. The Internet, or at least, The Web, becomes a Dark Forest of the Dead Internet (Theory), in which humans fear of speaking out and capturing the attention of the LLM who would siphon their creative essence for more, ever more training data. Interaction contracts into small meshes of trusted, verifiably human participants to keep the tides of spamslop at bay. Quasi-monastic orders that still scribe with pen and paper emerge, that believe there is still value in training and educating a human mind and body. - Unknown, 19 Feb 2026
- existsdaily 7mo agoScary... where can I find more of that?
- danielbln 7mo agoThere were no "dark ages", that's the same common wisdom blunder like "in the middle ages everybody was dressed in drab grey clothing, ate gruel and walked through mountains of poop everywhere". It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today. It was by no means a time of standstill.
- eru 7mo agoAs far as I can tell, the dark ages were called the dark ages because there wasn't much evidence to be found: writing was less prominent during that time. > It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today. You are seeing the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire a bit too rosy. Compare and contrast https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/ https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
- anizan 7mo agoSocial media is a tool for perpetuating monothought
- mhl47 7mo agoSocial Media creates distinctive Filter Bubbles. A dominant LLM company (or multiple aligned ones) create one way of thinking.
- paganel 7mo ago> contributed to the research, which was supported by funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. I guess when they're not busying bombing train infrastructure in Iran they have some money left to give to some propagandizing about AI. Always try to stay on top of the game!
- ynajjarine 7mo ago[dead]
- tom-blk 7mo agoThis is undoubtedly the case and imo quite concerning. Hard to minimize the effects as well, personally speaking.
- hexaga 7mo agoTry hate; it will do. But most will love it instead and you would be driven apart from them.
- api 7mo agoCompared to social media, probably for the better.
- dist-epoch 7mo ago> The team points to multiple studies showing that LLM outputs are less varied than human-generated writing and that LLM outputs tend to reflect the language, values and reasoning styles of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. ... The researchers say that AI developers should intentionally incorporate diversity in language, perspectives and reasoning into their models. Which is why Altman says Saudi Arabia should have it's own Sovereign AI cloud. Why should LLMs reflect democratic societies views on man and woman for example? They should also reflect the perspectives on man and woman that Saudi Arabia has, especially to local people. Western views should not be imposed on the rest of the world.
- uncanny2 7mo agoI 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 we have vaguely arbitrarily and ambiguously expected each human role to “figure out” for themselves? Simply as a catalog of expectations our experiences have been valuable, apart from the “automated” aspects the LLms provide.
- lamasery 7mo agoOne 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"
- stared 7mo agoYou are absolutely right!
- Brendinooo 7mo agoI would imagine a similar critique was leveled at the written word when it was starting to supplant oral cultures.
- eru 7mo agoWell, Plato's sock puppet Socrates famously opposed writing with pretty much these arguments.
- Brendinooo 7mo agoYup. And to be clear, maybe some things were genuinely lost when we switched to the written word. But I have to believe it was a net gain. Time will tell if that's true here as well.
- plastic-enjoyer 7mo agoNo, he did not and it would be good if people would have _actually_ read Plato's Phaedrus before regurgitating the same nonsense every time someone has a critical perspective on LLM writings.
- Brendinooo 7mo agoAre 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 intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves." aren't actual statements of opposition, or that there are no parallels to that and LLMs?
- jessep 7mo agoYeah, I’ve notice that people have started to sound like LLMs even when the LLMs aren’t writing for them. Not stupid people. Not lazy people. Some of the smartest people I know —- I can’t figure out how to use an em dash here, but you get the point.
- drtz 7mo agoThis could also be explained by the frequency illusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- mckirk 7mo agoIf writing goes the way music seems to be going with Angine de Poitrine gaining a huge following as a kind of allergic reaction of people against the 'AI sameness'... then we could be in for a wild ride. On the other hand, music is primarily an art form and writing (nowadays) is primarily utilitarian I would contend, so maybe the analogy doesn't quite hold up.
- masswerk 7mo agoNo diverging opinions, no unexpected critique, but universal basic intelligence. And here is the kicker: we won't even notice. Here's an easy three-step plan to unanimous democracy: • ask your LLM • don't edit — the LLM has already selected the most average and most plausible opinion for you • give it your voice, your voice matters Learn to anticipate — there may not always be a power bank to keep your phone from running low!
- stabbles 7mo agoOh no, LLMs threaten our individuality ⸻ what will we do?!
- compounding_it 7mo agoPeople are unloading the cognitive load onto the LLM. Probably because life stress is causing them to rely on technology to bring relief. It may not necessarily be a great choice.
- everdrive 7mo agoSo 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.
- rimliu 7mo agohow exactly the printing press did that?
- everdrive 7mo agoIt's actually an interesting topic, the printing press fostered a great normalization of the English language that was not previously present. https://academic.oup.com/book/41217/chapter-abstract/350687942?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false https://academic.oup.com/book/41217/chapter-abstract/3506879... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
- SketchySeaBeast 7mo agoOn the contrary, the printing press enabled people to quickly spread new ideas. Protestantism was enabled by it. That was quite the schism in thinking.
- everdrive 7mo agoDefinitely agreed -- I wasn't precise enough when making my point, but I think your point is absolutely correct.
- SketchySeaBeast 7mo agoI also agree with your follow-up around the normalization of language. It's a good point, but it seems like an improvement to standardize effective communication, and at the time it was outweighed by the ability to spread challenging heterogeneous ideas. LLMs threaten to engulf us in a uniform grey goo that lulls us away from critical consideration of what we're interacting with and, even more dangerously, creating.
- robofanatic 7mo agoWell, in few years not sure I will know how to think any more. If I am stuck on something I just ask the LLM and get the solution. While this shortcut sometimes saves me a ton of time and headaches, I miss that long route of thinking and getting to a solution myself. Maybe in future we will have gyms for brain workouts… I don’t know
- ori_b 7mo agoKnowing people have gone full "LLM-brain", it's not subtle.
- benreesman 7mo ago[dead]
- sobiolite 7mo agoHuman 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 seems especially susceptible to novelty in this way. Because the effects appear so fast and are often so striking, even disturbing, due to their unfamiliarity, it is tempting to imagine that they represent a fundamental transformation and break from the existing technological, social and moral order. And we extrapolate that their rapid growth will continue unchecked in its speed and intensity, eventually crowding out everything that came before it. 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. LLMs will certainly have an effect on how humans reason and communicate, but the idea that they will so effortlessly reshape it is, in my opinion, rather naive. The comments in this thread alone prove that LLM-speak is already a well-recognised dialect replete with clichés that most people will learn to avoid for fear of looking bad.
- jplusequalt 7mo ago>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.
- davebren 7mo ago
- indrex 7mo ago…and the first paragraph has an em dash
- jeffwask 7mo agoTake 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.
- RobotToaster 7mo agoIt'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.
- SketchySeaBeast 7mo agoThat 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.
- illusive4080 7mo agoThe 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.
- SketchySeaBeast 7mo agoI'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.
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoEnglish 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 English grammar only, and you baked that into every browser, I feel like my grammar would improve slightly. Word does it to an extent, but I don't use Word nearly enough for it to be meaningful. Firefox text spell checking was on 98% of the things I used online.
- Joel_Mckay 7mo agoSome play this everyday, as vocabulary will improve in time =3 https://play.freerice.com https://play.freerice.com
- rimliu 7mo agodid you mean "grammar nazi"? /s
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoTypo funnily enough.
- lamasery 7mo agoA 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 writing, not a straight-jacket put on them to keep them from hurting themselves. They unthinkingly cite Hemingway and borrow his clout, I suppose judging almost all writing before Hemingway and most after him, up until the 80s or 90s, as "bad" even when it's the work of masters. They blame the author when their stunted literacy (learning to write can hardly be separated from learning to read, at least at the more-advanced end of "to read") leaves them, as adults, struggling with texts once meant for children.
- nickphx 7mo agoWho is "us"?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- CompoundEyes 7mo agoAn 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/documents/Wheel-of-Emotions-Handout-(3).pdf https://www.isu.edu/media/libraries/counseling-and-testing/d...
- svachalek 7mo agoThis 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.
- davebren 7mo agoThis 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.
- kusokurae 7mo agoOn 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.
- taco_emoji 7mo agoCan't affect you if you don't use it
- metanoia_ 7mo ago[dead]
- iainctduncan 7mo agoOne has only to compare blogs and "thought leadership" posts from now and five years ago to see this is already happening, and big time.
- tarkin2 7mo agoPeople from a nation think and write alike because they share a common canon of literature and stories. It's just a pity AI was trained on mindless, garbage business-speak, and now that's our globalised common literature. And now we're feeding that regurgitated mindless, garbage business-speak back into AI models, thereby reinforcing the garbage and further rotting our minds.
- break_the_bank 7mo agoWrote about this a while ago actually; I called it the Billion Steve problem - https://x.com/gyani1595/status/2034652087494090829 https://x.com/gyani1595/status/2034652087494090829
- BoneShard 7mo agoI'm sorry it feels like an AI wrote it, at least partially.
- dfxm12 7mo agoLarge language models may be standardizing human expression I think it is important to distinguish "human expression" from copying a response from an LLM. Someone who outsources their thinking to an LLM is only offering an AI's expression. It's not human expression.
- incomingpain 7mo agoThe 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 https://www.trackingai.org/political-test You dont accidentally end up entirely left wing libertarian.
- lamasery 7mo agoThat quadrant is where basically all "Western" mainstream academia sits, and has for quite a long time, and they write an awful lot. I am a little surprised that the influence of online "influencer"-speak and marketing, being so voluminous and evident in the things' writing styles, hasn't dragged them other directions, though. Nor the enormous amount of socially authoritarian social media posting. I suppose the former is so empty of actual philosophical content (or, indeed, anything of substance) that it might have little effect, but the latter... that's weird. Maybe they're down-ranking by tone (angrier = lower-rank) which would sharply elevate academic-style writing, assuring a tendency toward economically-left liberalism.
- incomingpain 7mo agoI dont agree with the premise that is where academia sits. University of Dallas or University of Calgary is not going to show up in the far left. Not to mention religious universities like Redeemer in Hamilton. In fact, it should balance out, especially over centuries of global content. There's absolutely no chance that the training data itself is the bias. IT's the filtering and labelling of the content that introduces the bias. The AI companies are taking left wing content and labelling them "high quality prestige" and then looking at right wing content and labelling it "opinion low quality" or whatever. That is where the bias is occurring.
- lamasery 7mo ago> In fact, it should balance out, especially over centuries of global content. I do kinda wonder how this is divided up. I wouldn't be surprised if the median authorship-of-a-word age in these things' training sets is post-smartphone. Consider the sheer volume of video uploaded to Youtube in a day (and corresponding volume of transcript text) and that posting on a social media site or sending an email is way lower-effort than that. The amount of material we've been able to more-or-less durably record in the last couple decades dwarfs everything that came before. Choices of languages to ingest would also tend to make it a bit less "global" than might be ideal. > IT's the filtering and labelling of the content that introduces the bias. Oh, I agree and mentioned that some factor must be adjusting them away from the right. There's just far too much pro-authoritarianism and economically right-wing writing (to include Web posts, podcast or digitized radio show transcripts, et c) for them not to lean farther that way without some form of adjustment going on, even if it's only tone-based (and sure, there's probably more than that going on) The trouble is these data sets per se can hardly be called unbiased with respect to most any plausibly-useful reference point one might choose, so whether they adjust or not, the result will be some kind of bias, except with respect to the training dataset itself (obviously). Like, the sheer count of the positive representations of an idea in the data they've been able to get ahold of means neither that it's as commonly-positively-regarded in the wild as it appears from that narrow window (see: many observations about how very-few readers of social media or forums et c. post anything) nor (separately) that it's better-supported by evidence or reason or what-have-you than alternatives.
- wei03288 7mo ago[dead]
- mplanchard 7mo agoA really aggravating thing about seeing so much AI-generated text around is that it makes me constantly second-guess my own writing. Does that sentence sound natural? Am I veering into ChatGPT territory? God forbid I use an em-dash. And how much of the perception of it "feeling" like AI text is real vs. paranoia? It's incredibly frustrating, but maybe a silver lining is that it will help me write more authentically, I don't know.
- pdimitar 7mo agoWhile 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 advice. To me they have been a positive -- after careful curation.
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoYou would have been better off reading good english literature to improve your own writing.
- pdimitar 7mo agoI 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.
- odjeicjoejcje 7mo ago[flagged]
- pdimitar 7mo agoI could tell you more and it would've been an interest conversation but not after that unbelievably rude comment. WTF.
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoYou have no hours of the day where you can choose to do something? Are you a prisoner?
- minutesmith 7mo ago[flagged]
- jerf 7mo ago"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 training set is full of LLM-speak? This is transparently obviously false. This is the sort of massive, blinding error that calls everything else written in the article into question. Whatever their mental model of AI is it has no resemblance to reality.
- exe34 7mo agoThe problem isn't the diversity in the training set - the problem is that the method by design picks the average.
- jerf 7mo agoLLM 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.
- exe34 7mo agoLike foxes coming up with floppy ears.
- philbitt 7mo ago[dead]
- Manchitsanan 7mo ago[dead]
- amelius 7mo agoJust crank up the temperature.
- beej71 7mo agoLLMs 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.
- MengerSponge 7mo agoIt's just Gell-Mann amnesia.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- 2dfdxf 7mo agoAgreed. 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.
- MathMonkeyMan 7mo agoHm 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.
- IlyaIvanov0 7mo agoThe most interesting finding here is that LLMs make individuals generate more ideas but make groups generate fewer. The individual effect, in my own experience, depends entirely on how you use the tool. If you treat the first answer as the answer, you get the homogenization the article describes. If you use the LLM to attack your own framing from angles you wouldn't reach alone, you end up closer to first principles, not further. Same tool, opposite outcomes. The discipline is what differs, and most people probably default to the first mode.
- rob_c 7mo agoI know many people from the continent who sound American because they learned ENGLISH language that way... yes it's strange how the world of communication centres around the world of discourse... This isn't new. But nice to see more social sciences joining the party on the LLM bandwagon.
- yamamura_thinks 7mo agoIndeed. Everything will become uniform.
- mt18 7mo ago[dead]
- jbethune 7mo agoAnecdotally 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.
- stackedinserter 7mo agoThe problem is that we do want us to look, think and act alike. Mostly in corpo environment, but it spills into our "free" hours.
- hknceykbx 7mo agoNo shit
- booleandilemma 7mo agoSpeak for yourself (literally?). I don't use LLMs for my writing or editing, ever.
- _2fnr 7mo ago[flagged]
- carabiner 7mo agoHe's absolutely right, and that's not just insightful, that's prescient.
- nayuki 7mo ago> 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).
- tines 7mo agoYeah, that doesn't mean it's not a bad thing.
- crabl 7mo agothis is why it's so critical (IMO) to find ways to tune the models to produce more out-of-distribution outputs. it's incredibly easy to generate "in-distribution" text and the major labs are optimizing for this because of "safety", but the only way to generate truly creative outputs is to step in and out of the fringe.
- raincole 7mo agoI agree. The AI witch hunting has made people abandoned em-dashes. It also made me abandoned listing. At this point it will make us abandoned any structural writing in a few years.
- Fricken 7mo agoSure, the written word helped us to think and write more alike. The the Gutenberg press, radio and moving pictures, and then the internet. Modernity is an ognoing acti of cultural genocide that swallows everybody up and blends all human culture together into an undifferentiated grey goo. Several years ago I visited Flores Island, which is part of the Indonesian archipelago and the place where Archeologists discovered Hobbit man. The Island is only 150 km long but it's inhabitants speak 5 distinct languages and 80-something dialects.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- asdfman123 7mo agoHonestly, that's a totally valid concern. Let's delve into it.
- itmitica 7mo agoCalligraphy did not get stolen from individuals and put into typewriters, it got replaced by letters with a purpose. Did that make us more alike? No, it got us more connected. Is connectivity making us more alike? If it does, is it a bad thing? Then science is a bad byproduct of this connectivity. Or any rules: driving rules, laws, airports, hotels. What is this bullshit, targeting AI for a natural human convergence instinct? I suspect riding the anti-AI wagon is profitable and draws likes and follows but narrowing vision is not the way.
- cisco801 7mo ago[dead]