Ask Lemmy

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

Maybe they'll help people sort out the difference between "affect" and "effect".

We'll never ever start a phrase with "Certainly..." anymore

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What causes the loss of a local variety (dialect or language) is not simply exposure to other varieties, but the loss of the identity associated with said variety. In other words, what led to the blending and death of those dialects wasn't the audio communication technology - it's economical, social, and ideological pressures, such as nationalism.

I'll exemplify this using rhoticity in England. If telephone, radio and TV led to blending and death of dialects, you'd expect rhoticity in England to increase, due to exposure to American media. It didn't - it's decreasing:

Source for the map: it's a collation of both maps in this article. The reason for the shift however becomes obvious when you look at identity matters: "you're a Brit, speak like a Brit".

The exact same reasoning applies to other languages, by the way. Caipira Portuguese features aren't being replaced with the ones from that weird Globo TV accent, but with the ones spoken in São Paulo city; sheísmo in Argentina seems to be spreading, regardless of media from other countries; Occitan was not killed in France by simply exposing kids to French, but by making them feel ashamed of speaking Occitan.

With that out of the way, it's hard to predict the future impact of machine text generation, be it through LLMs or better models. It's perfectly possible that this sort of tech helps the preservation of local varieties, as LLMs are kind of good at translation; for example, I've noticed that Gemini is able to parse Venetian, even if unable to answer in the language.

I will share a journal entry from when I was mulling this over last December. Interested in your thoughts:

In old media, such as books and movies, we passively receive the media. We hear stories of heroes, songs about how the singer feels, written thoughts from inside another writer’s mind. These are valuable because of how we connect with others and thereby grow.

Interactive media, e.g. video games, allow us to tinker with a story and interrogate our relationship and attitude towards the ideas and themes thereby. We pull a lever, and the story changes direction. Video games have become such a large industry thanks to the more profound personal connection we can develop with the art through prescribed mechanical interactions. We press the buttons, and become the hero.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, it won’t be long before someone invents a new form of storytelling predicated on this technology. While we used to read stories, it now becomes possible for stories to be read into us. An AI can now be created that observes your life, and makes sense of it in a profound larger context.

This new media would be an AI companion who acts as a fourth wall of your life; layering your struggles and triumphs within a larger context, lightly editorializing, adding soundtracks that seamlessly portray your energy and emotional state (or humorously juxtapose it), adding humorous asides or callbacks that keep you in the moment, gently reminding and prompting next activities, reflecting on failures or calling attention to bad habits one is trying to break, and generally contriving to elevate the daily experience to the level of storytelling. It would give life an enhanced sense of meaningful examination, refining our sense of self and bringing our life into focus. This is a form of media that is not itself passively received, but actively treats your life as a fully interactive lived experience.

Art is integral to our ability to relate to others, experience things that are larger than ourselves, and to create meaning. This “fourth wall” AI would be a new form of media that seeks to amplify our understanding of ourselves, integrating our egos with our life as it exists as we change and grow throughout life.

The risks posed by malfeasant propagation of such a medium are at once beyond imagining and entirely predictable; the manufacturing of consent, the corrupting influence of profit motives, and the use of media as a social control mechanism are all pre-21st century concepts in media.

Whether a “fourth wall AI” represents a new threat or merely a quantum leap in the scale of preexisting threats cannot be known in advance. All of the above is to merely assert that we will see, and that such a medium could theoretically be used as art in the true sense, if such technology can be put in the hands of artists, and not just corporations.

Wait, who says it is the dominant branch of "AI development"? What does that mean, in fact? Who says it was telephone and radio that led to English hegemony? Who said thoughts and beliefs follow language? Most of the people I know in related fields seem to think that's widely disproved. I mean, no bad questions, but there's a TON of built-in assumptions in the OP and not all of them check out.

FWIW, I don't know that generated language gets to change much if it's generated by inferring likely language from human sources. At most there may be a newfound premium on using original, spontaneous sounding language in writing just to prove one's humanity by distinguishing from bland, generated language, but I suppose even that depends on how the tech moves forward.

The word arafed will enter the common lexicon.

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.

What about programming languages?

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).

Thoughts and beliefs generally follow language

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.

I figure they can either help or harm, depending on implementation:

Huggingface ( I always think of the "face-huggers" in Alien, when I see that name.. and have NO idea why they thought that association would be a Good Thing(tm) ) has a LLM which apparently can do Sanskrit.

Consider, though:

All the Indigenous languages, where we've only actually got a partial-record of the language, and the "majority rule, minority extinguishes" "answer" of our normal process .. obliterated all native speakers of that language ( partly through things like residential-schools, etc )..

now it becomes possible to have an LLM for that specific language, & to study the language, even though we've only got a piece of it.

This is like how we've sooo butchered the ecology that we can only study pieces of it, now, there's simply too-much missing from what was there a few centuries ago, so we're not looking at the origina/proper thing, either in ecologies or in languages.

sigh

This wasn't supposed to be depressing.

Consider how search-engines have altered how we have to communicate..

In order to FORCE a search-engine to consider a pair-of-words to be a single-term, you have to remove all intervening space/hyphens/symbols from between them.

ClimatePunctuation is a single search-token, but "Climate Punctuation" is two separate, unrelated terms, which may or may-not appear in the results.

It's obscene.

I'm almost mad-enough to want legislation forcing search-engines to respect some kind of standard set of defaults ( add more terms == narrowing the search, ie defaulting to Boolean AND, as one example ),

so they'd stop enshittifying our lives while "pretending" that they're helping.

( there was a Science news site which would not permit narrowing-of-search, and I hope they fscking died.

Making search unusable on a science site??

probably some "charity" who pays most of their annual-budget to their administration, & only exists for their entitlement.

I'm saying that after having encountered that religion in charities. )

Interesting:

search-engines alter our use-of-language,

social-sites do too,

LLM's do too,

marketing/propaganda does,

astroturfing does,

.. it begins looking like real events are .. rather-insignificant .. influences in our languages?

Hm...