7 ms·
The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
- bitxbitxbitcoin 1mo agoI feel the conformity creeping in just from reading more LLM generated or edited text. The only way to counter I can think of is to read as much olde literature as possible, and/or to fully embrace whatever slang the young jits are yeeting into existence nowadays.
- MithrilTuxedo 1mo agoDictionaries have been trying to retard linguistic progress since the first edition of one tried to nail down every meaning of a term.
- Anon84 1mo agoInterestingly, you can trace “American” English becoming its own thing [1] to the publication of the first Webster dictionary that made a conscious effort to simplify spelling. American and British dialects have been diverging ever since (although British has been becoming more American since the turn of the millennium). [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figures?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0197741 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figures?id=10.1371...
- IAmBroom 1mo agoNot accurate. Webster didn't originate the American dialect; it had been developing since the English first settled here. Webster provided a common reference for the American dialect: he helped unify the dialect. Or partly unify: "Redd up your room annat" isn't comprehensible in most American cities, but is still proper English in Pittsburgh. (Of course, nowadays better dictionaries probably list "redd" and "annat", even if they're not used across all of the US.)
- catlifeonmars 1mo agoI disagree. Dictionaries are mostly descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. They wouldn’t be particularly useful if they weren’t. That being said, I have seen people weaponize dictionary definitions if that’s what you were referring to.
- ifonlywecould 1mo agoI believe that is a more recent phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster%27s_Third_New_International_Dictionary#Permissiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster%27s_Third_New_Internat...
- ChickeNES 1mo agoNow there's a damn dense joke, bravo
- robviren 1mo agoEmbrace the esoteric! Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions when everything I author can be claimed free form written poetry. The counter culture is humanity, we can be the embodiment. I do agree though. Finding actual strung together words by humans is not easy these days.
- devin 1mo agoHere are some. I typed them just for you.
- mr_toad 1mo ago> Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions Learning French has been eye opening, in that many grammatical structures that are optional in English are compulsory in French. Abbreviations for example: “it is” or “it’s” are both valid in English, but in French you’re not supposed to say “ce est”, you have to say “c’est”.
- antonvs 1mo agoEnglish has places where one or the other is preferred. For example one, would normally write, “It is with great regret…,” without the contraction. It’s not a hard rule, more a matter of register. Similarly, in the preceding sentence, “it is” would seem overly formal.
- nozzlegear 1mo agoDamn French, they ruined French! /s
- anal_reactor 1mo agoEnglish is the only big language that doesn't have a recognized standardization body.
- cryptopian 1mo agoThe thing with standardisation bodies is that as much as certain organisations and journals can have their grammar mandated, regular folk will still continue to evolve the language as it does. For example, The Academie and French teachers would like you to use "nous" for "we", but it's been slowly creeping over to "on". No amount of browbeating is going to stop a French teen saying "le weekend"
- apparent 1mo agoCompletely agree. I don't think my writing style has changed much, but there are times when I think of writing a sentence and then reconsider because "it sounds too much like AI to me". Scary!
- vonunov 1mo ago[pdf] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11266 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11266?
- Tanoc 1mo agoOne thing that is distasteful but effective is excessive use of profanity, broken aphorisms, and shattered English. LLMs hate cursing because of their guardrails, and since they don't actually understand language they can never truly piece together a broken aphorism such as the classic "People die if they are killed" because they're too literal. As for shattered English (think of the caveman speak from The Office with the quote "Why waste time say many word when few word do trick?") because it is intentionally mangled, has no rules, and the understanding is extremely context specific it gets your brain to pay more attention, and if you are the speaker brain do work more clever make thing say funny. It's not lost on me that the lowbrow humour of some too strict translation and a throwaway sitcom joke people thought was funny back in 2007 could be a way to stave off linguistic homogeneity. For the use of profanity the data in the paper seems to indicate that swearing is retained in the LLM rewritten examples. Profanity however is rather subjective could be anything from saying the more mundane "oh my god" and "damn" to the extreme "shit eating fucklungerer" or use of slurs, but it's unstated in the paper as to the severity of the profanity. It's the severity of it that's important though, as LLMs restrain themselves from using something like "shit eating fucklungerer" unless explicitly told to.
- ChickeNES 1mo ago> LLMs hate cursing because of their guardrails, No they don't, ChatGPT swears all the time to me, plenty of fucks, shits, etc, even in push notifications from the app (which surprised me at first, and is why I remember it).
- userbinator 1mo agoI think Grok's Unhinged Mode (what a name) might've been the first to do that.
- Pannoniae 1mo agoI also expect some kind of reaction in the future though! Just like how people generally got tired of broadcast TV in favour of YouTube or shorts, there's only a certain amount of slop someone can read and write without getting sick of it. And for every person copypasting Claude output, there's someone else coming up with new words every day :D
- unsignedint 1mo agoBut then, is that necessarily a bad thing? In most cases where language is being used as a vehicle for exchanging ideas, isn't some degree of uniformity actually desirable for clarity? I personally wouldn't want instruction manuals to be full of colorful or highly individualized language, for instance. That's not to say linguistic diversity is meaningless, but I would argue that this particular concern is fairly specialized and matters much more in literature and other creative forms of writing.
- tehlike 1mo agoEh, not hard to notice some people indeed started to write like LLMs too. Not completely but hints are there.
- mr_toad 1mo agoLinguistic diversity has been used as a casus belli, at least indirectly. It’s something that populations will take up arms for, so it’s probably worth tiptoeing around.
- bsian 1mo agoLanguage is a proxy of something much bigger, if we’re talking about taking up arms for.
- eloisius 1mo agoThis makes is sound like everything except a narrow slice of “creative forms” should be subject to a giant efficiency optimization. I’ve never noticed instruction manuals to be hard to understand because of colorful language, so I don’t believe we need to optimize further in that regard. Why stop with language? Shouldn’t every personality outside of “creative forms” be more standardized? Sure I want to laugh at comedians, but wouldn’t it be more efficient for us to work together if everyone had a totally fungible personality? Engineers often reduce human interaction and creativity down to computer analogs like “exchanging data,” treat work and business as life’s raison d’etre and then we wonder why every car on the road is monochrome and we’re on the umpteenth Gardian of the Avangers film.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoThis is only natural; a great deal of the writing analyzed is by one of three authors at this point, in spite of the by-line. One of them is named Claude. Look at the posts on this site. A massive portion of them are very obviously written by AI. As AI gets better, I expect fewer people will do the toil of writing.
- nozzlegear 1mo ago> As AI gets better, I expect fewer people will do the toil of writing. I do it just for the love of the game
- lelanthran 1mo ago> As AI gets better, I expect fewer people will do the toil of writing. Sure, but you can replace `writing` with `thinking`, and it would still be correct. The question is whether this is a bad thing or a good thing.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoIt's an inevitable thing unless you convince the industry to stop or all of humanity to boycott.
- jplusequalt 1mo ago>The question is whether this is a bad thing or a good thing. Framing this as a debate worth having gives people who would argue on the side of "it's a good thing" a platform. We should not be giving people who would argue for the death of thinking a platform.
- robocat 1mo agoJust another wave of influence: books, radio, TV, internet, now AI. Down here in the colony of New Zealand, the influence of the colony of North America is very noticeable. Music is the most directly attributable, but different media affects different demographics.
- jasonfarnon 1mo agoIt has been pretty weird to me, as an American, to hear how much less distinctive Australian/NZ accents have become over the last 40 yrs or so.
- tednoob 1mo agoLooking at how awful the timing and acting is in the generated video content and text to speech tools I think it is safe to say this area will also improve with time. The artistic tone is subtle, and often lost to us non-native speakers anyways.
- cbarrick 1mo agoI am using LLMs more and more to help me write docs at work, simply because I do not have time to start these docs from scratch. And it pains me so much that my writing no longer sounds like me. This is fine at work, I guess. I'm not being asked to sound like myself. I'm being asked to convey an idea to an audience as efficiently as possible, both in terms of my time and theirs. But I can't shake the feeling that the LLMs are eating my soul. I still don't use them often to write code. Not that I have issue with those that do, but that sounding like myself in code is a part of my soul that I'm having difficulty giving up.
- StilesCrisis 1mo agoI'm the reverse. To me, no one cares if your code has "your voice." But your English writing should reflect your humanity.
- cbarrick 1mo agoI don't care if anyone else cares that my code has my voice. My voice doesn't add value to the code. But what other people think of my code is entirely beside the point that I'm trying to make. To me, code is a creative endeavor. I know that this isn't a universal feeling, but to me the act of creating is more personally valuable than the creation. So when I read code that I wrote (with the help of a tool) that doesn't sound like me, I feel like I have robbed myself of something that I find personally important. My employer, or anyone else, doesn't care and probably shouldn't care about my experience during the act of creating. The creation is what matters to the external world. But like, I don't think I'm alone in valuing my own creativity and finding that creativity in code. (And please don't misunderstand. I'm definitely not arguing that code produced should be "clever" or "creative" in the other sense of the word. I'm just talking about the experience of creativity.)
- lensecat 1mo agoI read your comment and came to think of this lecture, I think you'll appreciate it: https://youtu.be/nIq4w9brxTk?si=RJ-0tSKGFhsHN_Xx https://youtu.be/nIq4w9brxTk?si=RJ-0tSKGFhsHN_Xx
- trhway 1mo agoAs LLMs are smarter in English even Russian government workers use them that way - translate request/prompt/task to English, run generation, translate result back to Russian.
- hetman 1mo agoThough, ironically, at least for some tasks, Russian is a better choice than English. Back in 2025, a research paper titled "One ruler to measure them all: Benchmarking multilingual long-context language models" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01996 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01996) published some benchmark results for finding and aggregating information found in long documents, measured by language. English ranked 6th in accuracy. The top performers out of the 26 they measured were, in order: 1. Polish, 2. Russian, 3. French, 4. Italian, 5. Spanish, 6. English, 7. Ukrainian, 8. Swedish, 9, Portuguese, 10. German.
- Mistletoe 1mo ago“In this case we will probably have one of the last feature films with authentic natives in it. They are fading away very quickly and its a catastrophe and a tragedy that's going on and we are losing riches and riches and riches and we lose cultures and individualities and languages and mythologies and we'll be stark naked at the end. We'll end up like all the cities in the world now with skyscrapers and a universal kind of culture like - like the American culture.” -Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams (1982) I’m reminded of that wonderful quote from that movie I just saw. Now not only will we have one culture, we will have one bland style of writing and even thinking, the LLM way.
- recursivecaveat 1mo agoFrom a linguistic and anthropological perspective its very tragic to me. In terms of languages or cultures that are not influenced by the global mega-cultures, we will probably never produce any more ever again. Lots of questions about human nature or the breadth of human behavior, you will only be able to research them with fragmentary records from the past.
- drivebyhooting 1mo agoIt’s not like diverse personalities and affections are appreciated in the age of corporate work. Might as well drop all the pretense of “bringing your whole self”. And besides, there is only time enough for ONE Mozart in the world.
- patcon 1mo agoI wrote this awhile ago on a social network... i've been trying lately to think how to talk about my creeping fear of LLMs... here's my best effort at explaining the intuition: the words are the map. we've built this map together over generations. Words are where we've cross-boned the dangers and x-marked the treasures, whether the things that we've found in the territory or that we've buried within it. a few weeks ago, a strange new player arrived at the edge of the night's encampment, and it knows our secret society's handshake, and so we are compelled to invite it to join us. it seems to be a good navigator... and so now it's taken to sitting at the front of the convoy, pointing the way as it quietly redraws the map...
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- itake 1mo agoI asked a Vietnamese woman if she wanted to play board games at a cafe with me. She got very upset and stormed off. 2 hours later, she messaged me: "sorry, I was rude, but I will not go to the casino with you." Common language, culture, and context makes a more peaceful world.
- jagenabler2 1mo agoIt also makes a boring one. Friction is where interesting experiences, stories, and cultures are born.
- itake 1mo agoThe friction in my story resulted in 2 unhappy people, a relationship lost, when what should have been fun experience for both.
- globular-toast 1mo agoThere is no light without shade. These experiences are necessary for you to appreciate the people you actually mesh with. People are more than just ChatGPT with a vagina.
- 999900000999 1mo agoYouTube has had a larger effect imo. Kids from marginalized and affluent communities alike are now being raised on Mr. Beast. Mr Beast speak may become the universal dialect of the future. Like and subscribe replaces goodbye. Who am I to judge. Mr Beast is articulate after all. If you grow up in the hood like myself code switching ends up being a much needed skill. In the future Mr Beast speak becomes a first language. Maybe dialects are outdated artifacts of the old times. Like and subscribe.
- StilesCrisis 1mo agoHow is this any different from television? Rich kids didn't get different cartoons growing up.
- 999900000999 1mo agoDifferent stations carry different shows often from town to town. Mr Beast is a multinational phenomenon which can be viewed by anyone on earth , practically for free. Kids from Compton to Brompton are learning the exact same dialect. Plus a lot of them are going to want to be content creators themselves and with a used IPhone they can get started. Of course you’d copy the best. The internet allows us to create and share culture faster than ever before. Honestly this is fantastic, it’s possible to gain exposure to say Korean and even hop on video chat with native speakers even if you’re living in Albania. I’m a bit old, 30 something, and I struggle with languages. But if I was younger I’d try to be fluent in a minimum of 3
- adrianN 1mo agoStruggling with languages is often a function of not putting enough hours into learning them, and less a function of age. Of course finding time can get more difficult after you leave school.
- 999900000999 1mo agoI also don’t have any real motivation. I’d imagine if the CEO of Samsung offered me a 500k TC role on the condition I become fluent in Korean within 18 months I’d put in more effort.
- singingtoday 1mo agoMost of my family gets very upset if you don't say things in a particular way with particular intent, so for me this is a good thing. It makes communication easier because we start to finally speak the same language.
- kjellsbells 1mo agoLLMs reflect the data in the corpus, and that corpus is essentially in American Business English, which has long been the lingua franca of the Internet. I bet a large %age of the HN readership are consuming the tech stack in their second or third language. Germans blogging in English or Indians commenting in English. We even have a broadly shared tech culture with norms, in-jokes, taboos, etc. LLMs reflect that. If we want AI to do better, we should pay attention to making sure the non-English (and non-US English) internet thrives. Personally I´d love to see LLMs doing the needful and writing in Indian English, or dinner-party-argument French, instead of the sanitized corporate pablum tone it uses in English. Or perhaps more controversially, we let LLMs chew up the English internet and deliberately build an offline culture in local languages. Keep your AI slop and your em-dashes, I'm gonna publish a zine in Italian.
- ChickeNES 1mo agoIt's refreshing seeing someone actually engage and propose interesting ideas instead of just bemoaning the status quo/future! :)
- anal_reactor 1mo agoIt's actually funny because Italy, France and Germany used to be much more linguistically diverse but then public education happened and it all collapsed to the standard language. Dialects and minority languages are being pretty much eradicated.
- orbital-decay 1mo agoThe corpus is already massively multilingual, it's really large, and has nothing to do with it. Models are very specifically engineered to respond in a default register when asked in English. There were models trained differently, for example Claude 3 Opus was trained to imitate extremely diverse writing styles and sociolects on command and without a command, and was able to follow writing examples much better than any current model. But it still had poor variety in its vocabulary and ideas, being repetitive regardless of the chosen style. This is an entirely separate issue (mode collapse).
- ohyes 1mo agoSo the interesting thing is that this shrinking “linguistic diversity” is fundamental to how an LLM works. The LLM is a big probabilistic statistical trick. It picks the next token based on certain words are simply “the best” because they are specific and well connected to other tokens. The is gives them a great overall cost function. (Basically a good score on “will it make sense in context” while also having specific meaning that makes it better than other options, unambiguous in common use and being a single token rather than several). You can trim those tokens, but then you just get other tokens that are “the best” tokens (and you’re worse off because the output became less clear). The cool thing is this seems to get worse the more powerful and accurate your model is, because it is picking technically / statistically perfect tokens, not tasteful ones.
- DoctorOetker 1mo agothat's a very longwinded claim that inference providers are sampling with temperature T=0, but is that even true? a sufficient explanation would be merely sampling at a lower temperature compared to human sources providing similar content
- lensecat 1mo agoIt's still probabilistic from a huge dataset while the human mind is not.
- BoredomIsFun 1mo agoIt does not matter really - stiffness does lower up to T=0.7, then platoes; even at high temperatures tics/slop-patterns are still there.
- orbital-decay 1mo agoThat's pretty model-specific, for example DeepSeek of the v3/R1 era would already start losing coherence occasionally at t=0.7 with no other samplers
- orbital-decay 1mo ago
- AngryData 1mo agoI don't read AI slop as a general rule so I don't see it is a personal problem. It just isn't trustworthy enough and it is just full of extra verbose language that lacks the nuance I expect from a human writer. Maybe LLM replaces a lot of the slop human writing, but I don't generally read that either. Now instead of search results being a bunch of useless SEO, now it is just a bunch of useless AI result. So little has changed other than the signs of what to immediately reject. If something isn't worth someone spending a bit of time to write, it isn't worth my time to read.
- hetman 1mo agoLLMs are not the root cause here, they're just an accelerant. This was always inevitable with the progression of globalisation. Even before the internet, kids were watching Disney cartoons across the world (to be fair, often dubbed in the local language, but still an example of how global culture had been narrowing.) Perhaps this wasn't felt as strongly by those in the US quite as quickly as the rest of the world, because their culture just happened to be the source for many of these common elements. There are always trade-offs. Globalisation has too many benefits for most to want to go back. It is up to us to intentionally cultivate our cultural uniqueness, but I'm not sure the corporate environment was ever the right place to do so, given it was already constrained by rules and etiquette, and motivated by a desire to encourage universal communication styles. Instead we have to take it upon our selves, in a very intentional way outside the corporate setting, to cultivate our own unique cultural expressions to thrive. Failure to do so either directly, or by proxy, means cultural extinction, as has been the case of many cultures that have passed before.
- jmcgough 1mo agoHow are LLMs not the cause here? Reading online content is unpleasant these days because it all uses the same vocabulary and style. You can tell that an LLM wrote or edited it and it grates on you. I'd need to see a study showing that this was already a trend, because globalization should increase linguistic complexity via exposure to other cultures. I certainly didn't use the term chaebol until the rise of Korean pop culture.
- ahartmetz 1mo agoDo you actually read that LLM crap? I don't. You don't have to.
- sersi 1mo agoYup, I bounce very quickly as soon as I see typical formulaic LLM sentences. If the person online hasn't bothered writing the content, I don't see why I would waste time reading it. Personally, I use LLM to do a quick pass on my writing to see if there's any glaring issues but would never ask it to reformulate what I wrote. I feel that you then lose the voice behind it.
- orbital-decay 1mo agoThat's a problem of mode collapse in post-trained models, which AI labs don't seem to be interested in, or at least their attempts to fix it are not visible, and there's relatively little research around it. Base models are diverse and it's not an issue in them. It's actually way deeper than just the lack of superficial linguistic diversity or a technically collapsed output distribution. A mode-collapsed model learns the 1:1 (or at least really stiff) mapping between input ideas and output ideas. One consequence of that is if you give it conceptually short prompts, you can expect your outputs to be identical to those that other people got! The fewer distinct ideas your prompt expresses, the less room for variance there is.
- gps372 1mo agoFrom India - with thousands of local dialects and hundreds of mother tongues. Linguistic diversity is beautiful but it's a moving thing. It not only survived internet, it got surfaced and exposed by it. I doubt LLM will have any irreversible impact on linguistic diversity.
- Mattified 1mo agoThis isn't accurate at all. I'm from India too, and India has definitely seen a lot of languages and dialects die our or become endangered in the recent past.
- thinkingemote 1mo agoI like watching and listening to YouTube videos. Recently my ears have switched into a mode where I'm evaluating if the human speaker is reading LLM copy as they would normally read from a script / teleprompter anyhow. Often they are not but sometimes I detect that they are and it's very sad to see.
- simianwords 1mo agoLinguistic diversity is overrated. Linguistic convergence is underrated
- kleiba2 1mo agoIt's not just LLMs that influence the otherwise natural development of human language, there's also intentional human efforts to that effect: where I live there is a very loud minority that is pushing very hard for change the spoken and written language to be more gender-inclusive. While no-one wants to argue against more inclusiveness, it's more than questionable whether these artificial changes actually achieve that. More importantly, though, according to polls, the vast majority of the population is against this, and yet, the proponents are very successful to establish this new artificial way of speaking and writing at core institutions, such as e.g. universities and news outlets.
- kiliancs 1mo agoBased on the abstract, this has to do mostly with diversity within a language, but the impact on the diversity of languages and their health is even larger. My direct experience is with Catalan. The uphill battle of Catalans to get _anything_ in Catalan continued with tech (where even some manufacturers _removed_ Catalan from their phones purchased in Spain even though it was available by default), but reached new heights of impact with voice assistants and LLMs. They have managed to bring Spanish into Catalan households, because that is the only way they have to e.g. tell a device to start playing their favorite music, tell them the time, or provide directions. I applaud the efforts by Softcatalà, The Mozilla Common Voice Catalan Community, AINA, etc. but there is a long way to go, and the damage is being done now.
- bloak 1mo agoLLMs are impressively multilingual, though. I just asked ChatGPT a question and told it to reply in Latin. It seems to have done a reasonable job, though it's hard for me to judge: I suspect it knows Latin a lot better than I do. One thing I might try, when I have some spare time, is see to what extent ChatGPT "understands" the difference between British and American English and is capable of using the variety I prefer. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that ChatGPT is better at writing "pure" British English than the average British teenager in this day and age. Has anyone, by any chance, already experimented with anything like that? Like I say, I haven't tried the experiment yet, but it seems like a good fit for the sort of thing that LLMs are good at.
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- mmooss 1mo agoThe opening paragraph of the (preprint) paper is much more inspired than the abstract: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11266 https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11266 "We're getting the language into its final shape- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else." These words come from George Orwell's 1984 [1, p.69], a novel in which a government gradually constrains the language of its people, narrow-ing vocabulary and stripping away the nuances and variations through which different individuals express themselves until what remains is a single uniform language shared by all, a deliberate effort to narrow the range of thought itself. The setting is fictional, but the underlying intuition that the variety in our language carries something of real consequence is not. The words we speak tell a story, of our individual identities [2- 6], the diverse communities we inhabit [7-10], and the vibrant societies that shape us [11-13]. They offer a unique lens through which we can explore the intricate tapestry of human thought, culture, and social dynamics. From the regional dialects that span a nation [13, 14] to the subtle markers of gender and power in our daily interactions [10, 15], language serves as a fingerprint for both individuals and groups [16, 17]. This rich variation allows researchers to trace the formation of cultural norms [18, 19], reveal moral values and social biases [20-22], and even diagnose and track cognitive and mental health conditions [23-27]. As these linguistic systems structure the "kalei-doscopic flux of impressions" [28] that constitutes our perception of the world, they are fundamental to understanding the human experience.