The ubiquity of audio commutation technologies, particularly telephone, radio, and TV, have had a significant affect on language. They further spread English around the world making it more accessible and more necessary for lower social and economic classes, they led to the blending of dialects and the death of some smaller regional dialects. They enabled the rapid adoption of new words and concepts.
How will LLMs affect language? Will they further cement English as the world’s dominant language or lead to the adoption of a new lingua franca? Will they be able to adapt to differences in dialects or will they force us to further consolidate how we speak? What about programming languages? Will the model best able to generate usable code determine what language or languages will be used in the future? Thoughts and beliefs generally follow language, at least on the social scale, how will LLM’s affects on language affect how we think and act? What we believe?
None, because it’s a dead end and will burn out in the next few years.
is this one of those “tech bros bad” takes?
Seeing as I’m very much a tech bro, no, hah.
That’s certainly possible. LLMs led to these questions for me but I think they will equally apply to any communicative AI that sees wide adoption.
Do you actually believe this?
LLMs are the opposite of a dead end. More like the opening of a pipe. It’s not that they will burn out, it’s just that they’ll reach a point that they’re just one function of a more complete AI perhaps.
At the very least they tackle a very difficult problem, of communication between human and machine. Their purpose is that. We have to tell machines what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. With such precision that there is no room for error. LLMs are not tools to prove truth, or anything.
If you ask an LLM a question, and it gives you a response that indicates it has understood your question correctly, and you are able to understand its response that far, then the LLM has done it’s job, regardless of if the answer is correct.
Validating the facts of the response is another function again, which would employ LLMs as a translation tool.
It’s not a long leap from there to a language translation tool between humans, where an AI is an interpreter. deepl on roids.
My belief is that LLMs are a dead end that will eventually burn out, but because they’ll be replaced with better models. In other words machine text generation will outlive them, and OP’s concerns are mostly regarding machine text generation, not that specific technology.