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?
As McLuhan said, the medium is the message. If this is a story AI is telling about you to you, then it would probably best be a purely private experience happening in headphones or around the house. If this is a story where you are woven into the world as a character in other peoples’ lives, it should be happening around you. In cinematic storytelling we talk about whether something is “diegetic”; is the soundtrack coming from something in the world, or is it something only the audience can perceive as part of a constructed experience? If the goal of a “fourth wall AI” (should be in my opinion) to make your perception of yourself more fully unified with the world around you, I’d advocate for these things to be realized ‘diegetically’, so that multiple fourth-wall AI would have to work together to create harmony in the reality they construct for their audiences. I think on a more sociological level, I am worried about how much we each feel separate and different from one another in society. I think that having the fourth wall AI be strictly a public phenomenon would be a better choice not just from an artistic perspective, but from a sense of its potential for reinforcing our social fabric.