The ubiquity of audio commutation technologies, particularly telephone, radio, and TV, have had a significant affect on language. They further spread English around the world making it more accessible and more necessary for lower social and economic classes, they led to the blending of dialects and the death of some smaller regional dialects. They enabled the rapid adoption of new words and concepts.
How will LLMs affect language? Will they further cement English as the world’s dominant language or lead to the adoption of a new lingua franca? Will they be able to adapt to differences in dialects or will they force us to further consolidate how we speak? What about programming languages? Will the model best able to generate usable code determine what language or languages will be used in the future? Thoughts and beliefs generally follow language, at least on the social scale, how will LLM’s affects on language affect how we think and act? What we believe?
Something I’m worried about is how the diversity of language is going to be affected. Nowadays we have AIs that tell us how we should be writing things, such as grammarly. I fear that most language, especially the more “formal”, will devolve to basically what “grammarly says is correct”. With the spread of platforms using AI to moderate their content, I worry the way people will talk will also be influenced by trying to appease an algorithm. You can kind of see it with Youtube, where people have to avoid using certain terms otherwise Youtube will steal their income. There’s a beauty in diversity, it’d be a shame to have that erased and people forced to all be the same sterile person.
Programming languages are fundamentally different to spoken languages. If AI develops to a point where it can be used to control a computer, I’d say that’s not programming unless you describe what you want extremely precisely (in which case, using an AI to muddy it up isn’t helpful).
Isn’t this actually a myth? There’s value in giving names to things, but those names don’t change how people feel or what they believe in. I’d imagine most people sometimes feel emotions that “they can’t quite put a finger on” or their political beliefs don’t really align up with a manifesto.