Agree on the potential, and it could be very insidious. Just tweak the frequency of words, tweak one down in favor of another and suddenly millions of people read a word more frequently than normal while the other is subtly less frequent. You might manage to erase a word like that without anyone crying about it if you tune it out slowly enough.

Yes, and even among other generations, AI isn’t acclaimed and well received by everyone, made evident by the number or sabotage news I’ve seen recently.

I do touch on that later on in a still WIP article. I initially wondered if LLMs have the potential to interfere with our words and meaning, and I’d argue they do. At what time scale, I do not know yet, I’m still trying to gather evidence for that. And I’m not arguing either in the subsequent articles that this will absolutely happen. Nobody knows how things will pan out exactly. The thesis is simply can AI interfere with language and meaning, and what could it look like?

You argue that people are still influenced by people and that is true, and I also write later on that part of the population rejects AI entirely and will thus resist the potential effects I discuss. But there is plenty of existing currents like anti-vaccines that show how a part of a population can have consequence on the entire population.

Then again, I decided to write those articles because I think it is worth exploring. Not because I want to spread AI doom stories or worry people but simply because that’s where my curiosity leads me.

To clarify one important thing though: I am not a scientist or an expert in the area. I’m a translator by trade, and since I couldn’t find anything related to this, I decided to try and write my own paper. I learned how to do it when I was still a student but it’s a while back and I don’t have the resources or institutional backup to carry on my own experiments. I’m simply trying to find evidence and synthetize it. My hope is 1) that it interests people and get them to think about it and 2) maybe in those people I got thinking, there will be actual researchers with the means to do that properly.

I’m currently studying and gathering studies about language and cognition to see if LLMs could do anything to our culture. So far I’d lean to say that, yes, they could curate our words and thus alter the way we speak, write and think. Words are linked to our perception of reality somehow and given enough time our overlords could curate words they like, shadowban others and in that way interact with what we can communicate and think about.

Obviously there is a large group of people rejecting AI so they wouldn’t suffer from this.

Same thing for translation. They replaced us with AI and ask us to proofread and correct the mess for 1/4 the price. I stopped my translation career over this.

Claude is neutral and can be given to women too. Though it lost popularity over the male version. There is even a fruit called “La reine Claude” which back translates to the queen Claude. But yeah, Claude was male in my head too so I’m definitely guilty of that too despite knowing and actively trying not to anthropomorphize Large lying models

Hum. I’ve been smooth sailing for a while now. I’ve tried installing OwnTracks again and made some progress by figuring out cloud flare tunnels are a problem (at least the way I configured them). New to MQTT. So the app still doesn’t work properly but now I have an idea why and I’m not just banging my head on the wall anymore.