Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics.
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
It'll be interesting to see how it affects the average person's written communication. When we know technology can handle something for us, our brains seem to let it carry the load. Think of all the people who aren't great communicators or might not be confident in their English who would love to rely on this already.
I guess it's a matter of perspective whether you view it as a crutch or a boon, which I'm sure has been a conversation about many pieces of technology over the years:
People were better at remembering phone numbers before cell phones stored them. People were better at remembering how to spell words before spell check/autocorrect. People were better at writing by hand before typewriters/keyboards. etc
People who rely too heavily on autocorrect do already now cause misunderstandings by writing something they did not intend to.
I had a friend during uni who was dyslectic, and while the words in his messages were written proper you still had to guess the context from the randomly thrown together words he presented you with.
Now that we can correct not only a single word or roughly the structure of a sentence, but instead fabricate whole paragraphs and articles by providing a single sentence, I imagine we will see a stark increase in low-quality content, accidental false information, and easily preventable misunderstandings - More than we already have.
Damn. I hadn't made that connection yet, that's actually quite worrying.
If reliance on LLMs does begin to affect language skills negatively, it could become a significant problem. Let alone the political implications, I believe that people are more capable of navigating personal relationships when they have a strong command of language.
Each generation thinks they had it the right way and younger ones have it easy. You can go back centuries with people pushing each other down.
What should be encouraged is the exchange of ideas and healthy debate. Words are just a tool for that, and spelling and grammar and " not knowing Latin" are components of it.
A couple generations down the road we would be able to accurately transmit our thoughts to other people and calibrate for their culture and growing up biases, and the generation immediately before it will whine when LLM was the right way to communicate.
Eh, LLMs do have a significant problem in how they can generate false information by themselves. Every other tool prior requires a person to make said false information, but LLMs can just generate it when asked a question
So what's your point, should we trust machines less than the unhinged uncle at Thanksgiving?
Jup, most definitely!
I'd much rather have just one unhinged uncle at St. Martin's Day than having everybody come off as the unhinged uncle by lack of supervision of the LLMs talking in your place, making it seem like being unhinged is normal and thereby creating artificial peer pressure in a truly wicked exercise of laziness.