Comment by yesco
12 hours ago
If we focus only on the impact on linguistics, I predict things will go something like this:
As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.
Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles. Despite this, vocabulary and semantics as a whole become more uniform. Spelling errors and typos become increasingly rare.
In parallel, people start using LLMs to summarize content in a style they prefer.
Both sides of this gradually converge. Content gets explicitly written in a way that is optimized for consumption by an LLM, perhaps a return to something like the semantic web. Authors write content in a way that encourages a summarizing LLM to summarize as the author intends for certain explicit areas.
Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before, and perhaps less ambiguous. Language is the primary interface an LLM uses with humans, so even if LLM use becomes baseline for many things, if information is not being communicated effectively then an LLM would be failing at its job. I'm personifying LLMs a bit here but I just mean it in a game theory / incentive structure way.
> people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles
We're already seeing people use AI to express themselves in several contexts, but it doesn't lead to an increased range of styles. It leads to one style, the now-ubiquitous upbeat LinkedIn tone.
Theoretically we could see diversification here, with different tools prompting towards different voices, but at the moment the trend is the opposite.
>Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before
Guttural vocalizations accompanied by frantic gesturing towards a mobile device, or just silence and showing of LLM output to others?
I was primarily discussing written language in my post, as that's easier to speculate on.
That said, if most people turn into hermits and start living in pods around this period, then I think you would be in the right direction.
>People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.
While sometimes I do dump a bunch of scratch work and ask for it to be transformed into organized though, more often I find that I use LLM output the opposite way.
Give a prompt. Save the text. Reroll. Save the text. Change the prompt, reroll. Then going through the heap of vomit to find the diamonds. Sort of a modern version of "write drunk, edit sober" with the LLM being the alcohol in the drunk half of me. It can work as a brainstorming step to turn fragments of though into a bunch of drafts of thought, then to be edited down into elegant thought. Asking the LLM to synthesize its drafts usually discards the best nuggets for lesser variants.