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?
This is a really interesting, thoughtful comment (and exactly why I love lemmy).
I don’t know if it’s just my lack of imagination, but I find your description of AI pet/companion as an art/media object much more plausible and interesting rather than when people discuss their possible sentience. It really doesn’t seem to many steps from Spotify’s discovery weekly playlist or Google Assistant reading all my emails, when combined with LLM capacity to plausibly bullshit, to having a ‘virtual friend’ who texts me jokes, questions and what not.
Especially since we’ve both normalised interacting with humans in entirely digital ways & created a massive corpus of how humans interact via social media archives. Why do I want a calendar app pinging me a notification when I could have a virtual companion message me “I hope your haircut goes well this afternoon, looking forward to seeing your new look!” or “don’t fucking forget your appointment again you dumbass” depending on what companion I purchased.
Given many people’s preference to “get everything in one place”, it seems likely that instead of newsletters, comedy subs or travel updates, we’ll just have different imaginary friends sending us the stuff we need/want to know, mixed in with our actual friends. Some of whom might as well be virtual since we never see them in the flesh.
I don’t even truly understand my own sentience - how can we ask a machine to replicate something we do not understand? It would be like throwing rocks into a dark pool, and hoping something friendly crawls out of the water.