Comment by Nevermark
8 days ago
I suggest that dogs are not a good comparison.
Interaction with language models involves a significant use of language and thought. Is not repetitive. And many users (myself included) continually find new ways to use them.
Others may take their time adopting language models, or be slower to branch out into many kinds of use, but young people in particular will be very fast adopters and adapters. That will be the place to watch.
"Even faster" with respect to inference learning, wasn't an attempt to undersell changes happening now. Teachers are experiencing a lot of new issues with how students respond to the availability of models today. One being the potential for students to put less effort into their own communications. If that continues, it won't just be a "dumbing" of literacy, it will have its own impact on vocabulary and grammar.
But looking forward is unavoidable. Models are not going to stay still long enough to say what stage impacted what changes. Model changes are too fast and fluid.
Well, this era is just getting started, so a diversity of expectations makes sense.
I think you might be underestimating human-to-dog interactions. Interacting with dogs require a whole lot of empathy and thought.
But really this is beyond the point. I didn’t provide dog interactions as an analogy, rather, I provided it as a counter point. We speak differently to dogs then we speak with each other, and have done so for thousands of years. I see no reason why LLM’s would have any more profound effects on our language. We will continue to speak with each other in a normal manner just like before.
> We will continue to speak with each other in a normal manner just like before.
We may just be operating on different versions of "significant" change. Because I do agree with that statement.
I just think there will be language changes directly tied to adaption/adaption with models in our lives. In addition to the normal drift and adaptation. And that the rate of language change is likely to be faster, both due to interaction with models, and indirectly due to accelerated changes in general.