LLMs reflect the data in the corpus, and that corpus is essentially in American Business English, which has long been the lingua franca of the Internet.
I bet a large %age of the HN readership are consuming the tech stack in their second or third language. Germans blogging in English or Indians commenting in English. We even have a broadly shared tech culture with norms, in-jokes, taboos, etc. LLMs reflect that.
If we want AI to do better, we should pay attention to making sure the non-English (and non-US English) internet thrives. Personally I´d love to see LLMs doing the needful and writing in Indian English, or dinner-party-argument French, instead of the sanitized corporate pablum tone it uses in English.
Or perhaps more controversially, we let LLMs chew up the English internet and deliberately build an offline culture in local languages. Keep your AI slop and your em-dashes, I'm gonna publish a zine in Italian.
i've been trying lately to think how to talk about my creeping fear of LLMs... here's my best effort at explaining the intuition:
the words are the map. we've built this map together over generations. Words are where we've cross-boned the dangers and x-marked the treasures, whether the things that we've found in the territory or that we've buried within it.
a few weeks ago, a strange new player arrived at the edge of the night's encampment, and it knows our secret society's handshake, and so we are compelled to invite it to join us. it seems to be a good navigator... and so now it's taken to sitting at the front of the convoy, pointing the way as it quietly redraws the map...
Kids from marginalized and affluent communities alike are now being raised on Mr. Beast. Mr Beast speak may become the universal dialect of the future.
Like and subscribe replaces goodbye. Who am I to judge. Mr Beast is articulate after all.
If you grow up in the hood like myself code switching ends up being a much needed skill.
In the future Mr Beast speak becomes a first language. Maybe dialects are outdated artifacts of the old times.
They didn't get different ones, but they may have watched different ones, especially if rich parents/tutor/babysitter controls the TV vs a latchkey child vs a child of a single mother. Not sure I would make any strict claims though, but food for thought.
Different stations carry different shows often from town to town.
Mr Beast is a multinational phenomenon which can be viewed by anyone on earth , practically for free.
Kids from Compton to Brompton are learning the exact same dialect. Plus a lot of them are going to want to be content creators themselves and with a used IPhone they can get started.
Of course you’d copy the best.
The internet allows us to create and share culture faster than ever before.
Honestly this is fantastic, it’s possible to gain exposure to say Korean and even hop on video chat with native speakers even if you’re living in Albania.
I’m a bit old, 30 something, and I struggle with languages. But if I was younger I’d try to be fluent in a minimum of 3
I am using LLMs more and more to help me write docs at work, simply because I do not have time to start these docs from scratch. And it pains me so much that my writing no longer sounds like me.
This is fine at work, I guess. I'm not being asked to sound like myself. I'm being asked to convey an idea to an audience as efficiently as possible, both in terms of my time and theirs.
But I can't shake the feeling that the LLMs are eating my soul.
I still don't use them often to write code. Not that I have issue with those that do, but that sounding like myself in code is a part of my soul that I'm having difficulty giving up.
LLMs are pretty bad at compressing ideas down to the level a smart human can. I think this is quite important for good documentation. Essentially the AI wont do a good job of highlighting the really important and essential details unless you go in and edit the writing by hand afterwards using your human intuition. I am not saying to not use LLMs to write docs, but I would definitely edit to expose the really important details as early as possible in the docs and leave the bulk boring stuff the LLM writes for later.
For sure. But I can definitely produce something good enough to get the job done in a much shorter time by bootstrapping myself from an LLM output and editing from there. (I do edit. Raw LLM output is such a drag to read. Too low signal.)
I don't care if anyone else cares that my code has my voice. My voice doesn't add value to the code. But what other people think of my code is entirely beside the point that I'm trying to make.
To me, code is a creative endeavor. I know that this isn't a universal feeling, but to me the act of creating is more personally valuable than the creation. So when I read code that I wrote (with the help of a tool) that doesn't sound like me, I feel like I have robbed myself of something that I find personally important.
My employer, or anyone else, doesn't care and probably shouldn't care about my experience during the act of creating. The creation is what matters to the external world.
But like, I don't think I'm alone in valuing my own creativity and finding that creativity in code.
(And please don't misunderstand. I'm definitely not arguing that code produced should be "clever" or "creative" in the other sense of the word. I'm just talking about the experience of creativity.)
I am pretty anti-AI, but for once I am reading someone's complete and balanced take on things. Despite it's usefulness on the surface, I do think the lost of human personalities is tragic. Efficiency aside, it's the only thing that makes anything worthwhile.
In most cases where language is being used as a vehicle for exchanging ideas, isn't some degree of uniformity actually desirable for clarity? I personally wouldn't want instruction manuals to be full of colorful or highly individualized language, for instance.
That's not to say linguistic diversity is meaningless, but I would argue that this particular concern is fairly specialized and matters much more in literature and other creative forms of writing.
Linguistic diversity has been used as a casus belli, at least indirectly. It’s something that populations will take up arms for, so it’s probably worth tiptoeing around.
This makes is sound like everything except a narrow slice of “creative forms” should be subject to a giant efficiency optimization. I’ve never noticed instruction manuals to be hard to understand because of colorful language, so I don’t believe we need to optimize further in that regard. Why stop with language? Shouldn’t every personality outside of “creative forms” be more standardized? Sure I want to laugh at comedians, but wouldn’t it be more efficient for us to work together if everyone had a totally fungible personality?
Engineers often reduce human interaction and creativity down to computer analogs like “exchanging data,” treat work and business as life’s raison d’etre and then we wonder why every car on the road is monochrome and we’re on the umpteenth Gardian of the Avangers film.
I completely agree with your critique here but I will say that I have had difficulty understanding pure math texts because of 'colorful' language -- e.g. "chattier" treatments of mathematical analysis. But I will also say that I'm glad such treatments of the material exist, partly because I know that what appeals to me doesn't appeal to others and these might be a valued resource for them, and because often pushing through and understanding texts that were difficult at first helps us to see the material from a different perspective. I think this optimization perspective squashes this possibility a bit when taken too far, as it usually is
There’s no universal answer. Like most things it’s highly subjective and some people will want the standardization line to be in a particular place than someone else. I for instance, love the standardization of programming and science research for the most part into one language but at the same time, I also feel terrible about languages that are hundreds or thousands of years old disappearing forever.
Human laguage is rich and expressive, matching human thought. The diversity is part of the expressiveness. Saying something in some poetic, or merely different way, is not just an inefficient or ambiguous/confusing way of saying the same thing, it's saying something else, and that something else cannot be expressed any other way.
A crayons-only, thumbs-only, Apple one-button-only, 1000 word vocabulary world is not efficient, it's poor.
I think it was the Uplift series by David Brin that has an idea where the old galactic races all speak a perfect language that has no ambiguity, and because of that they have no poetry or jokes. What a great world to strive for. No I'll take the mess please FFS.
People joke about engineer types treating humans the same as machines, but really I see no excuse for even engineer types to get this wrong. It's a failure to recognize what the function or goal actually is, and then optimizing for the wrong thing.
Most of my family gets very upset if you don't say things in a particular way with particular intent, so for me this is a good thing. It makes communication easier because we start to finally speak the same language.
Looking at how awful the timing and acting is in the generated video content and text to speech tools I think it is safe to say this area will also improve with time. The artistic tone is subtle, and often lost to us non-native speakers anyways.
I feel the conformity creeping in just from reading more LLM generated or edited text. The only way to counter I can think of is to read as much olde literature as possible, and/or to fully embrace whatever slang the young jits are yeeting into existence nowadays.
Embrace the esoteric! Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions when everything I author can be claimed free form written poetry. The counter culture is humanity, we can be the embodiment.
I do agree though. Finding actual strung together words by humans is not easy these days.
> Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions
Learning French has been eye opening, in that many grammatical structures that are optional in English are compulsory in French. Abbreviations for example: “it is” or “it’s” are both valid in English, but in French you’re not supposed to say “ce est”, you have to say “c’est”.
English has places where one or the other is preferred. For example one, would normally write, “It is with great regret…,” without the contraction. It’s not a hard rule, more a matter of register. Similarly, in the preceding sentence, “it is” would seem overly formal.
Interestingly, you can trace “American” English becoming its own thing [1] to the publication of the first Webster dictionary that made a conscious effort to simplify spelling. American and British dialects have been diverging ever since (although British has been becoming more American since the turn of the millennium).
One thing that is distasteful but effective is excessive use of profanity, broken aphorisms, and shattered English. LLMs hate cursing because of their guardrails, and since they don't actually understand language they can never truly piece together a broken aphorism such as the classic "People die if they are killed" because they're too literal. As for shattered English (think of the caveman speak from The Office with the quote "Why waste time say many word when few word do trick?") because it is intentionally mangled, has no rules, and the understanding is extremely context specific it gets your brain to pay more attention, and if you are the speaker brain do work more clever make thing say funny.
It's not lost on me that the lowbrow humour of some too strict translation and a throwaway sitcom joke people thought was funny back in 2007 could be a way to stave off linguistic homogeneity.
For the use of profanity the data in the paper seems to indicate that swearing is retained in the LLM rewritten examples. Profanity however is rather subjective could be anything from saying the more mundane "oh my god" and "damn" to the extreme "shit eating fucklungerer" or use of slurs, but it's unstated in the paper as to the severity of the profanity. It's the severity of it that's important though, as LLMs restrain themselves from using something like "shit eating fucklungerer" unless explicitly told to.
No they don't, ChatGPT swears all the time to me, plenty of fucks, shits, etc, even in push notifications from the app (which surprised me at first, and is why I remember it).
This is only natural; a great deal of the writing analyzed is by one of three authors at this point, in spite of the by-line. One of them is named Claude.
Look at the posts on this site. A massive portion of them are very obviously written by AI.
As AI gets better, I expect fewer people will do the toil of writing.
Just another wave of influence: books, radio, TV, internet, now AI.
Down here in the colony of New Zealand, the influence of the colony of North America is very noticeable. Music is the most directly attributable, but different media affects different demographics.
As LLMs are smarter in English even Russian government workers use them that way - translate request/prompt/task to English, run generation, translate result back to Russian.
“In this case we will probably have one of the last feature films with authentic natives in it. They are fading away very quickly and its a catastrophe and a tragedy that's going on and we are losing riches and riches and riches and we lose cultures and individualities and languages and mythologies and we'll be stark naked at the end. We'll end up like all the cities in the world now with skyscrapers and a universal kind of culture like - like the American culture.” -Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams (1982)
I’m reminded of that wonderful quote from that movie I just saw. Now not only will we have one culture, we will have one bland style of writing and even thinking, the LLM way.
From a linguistic and anthropological perspective its very tragic to me. In terms of languages or cultures that are not influenced by the global mega-cultures, we will probably never produce any more ever again. Lots of questions about human nature or the breadth of human behavior, you will only be able to research them with fragmentary records from the past.
LLMs reflect the data in the corpus, and that corpus is essentially in American Business English, which has long been the lingua franca of the Internet.
I bet a large %age of the HN readership are consuming the tech stack in their second or third language. Germans blogging in English or Indians commenting in English. We even have a broadly shared tech culture with norms, in-jokes, taboos, etc. LLMs reflect that.
If we want AI to do better, we should pay attention to making sure the non-English (and non-US English) internet thrives. Personally I´d love to see LLMs doing the needful and writing in Indian English, or dinner-party-argument French, instead of the sanitized corporate pablum tone it uses in English.
Or perhaps more controversially, we let LLMs chew up the English internet and deliberately build an offline culture in local languages. Keep your AI slop and your em-dashes, I'm gonna publish a zine in Italian.
I wrote this awhile ago on a social network...
i've been trying lately to think how to talk about my creeping fear of LLMs... here's my best effort at explaining the intuition:
the words are the map. we've built this map together over generations. Words are where we've cross-boned the dangers and x-marked the treasures, whether the things that we've found in the territory or that we've buried within it.
a few weeks ago, a strange new player arrived at the edge of the night's encampment, and it knows our secret society's handshake, and so we are compelled to invite it to join us. it seems to be a good navigator... and so now it's taken to sitting at the front of the convoy, pointing the way as it quietly redraws the map...
YouTube has had a larger effect imo.
Kids from marginalized and affluent communities alike are now being raised on Mr. Beast. Mr Beast speak may become the universal dialect of the future.
Like and subscribe replaces goodbye. Who am I to judge. Mr Beast is articulate after all.
If you grow up in the hood like myself code switching ends up being a much needed skill.
In the future Mr Beast speak becomes a first language. Maybe dialects are outdated artifacts of the old times.
Like and subscribe.
How is this any different from television? Rich kids didn't get different cartoons growing up.
They didn't get different ones, but they may have watched different ones, especially if rich parents/tutor/babysitter controls the TV vs a latchkey child vs a child of a single mother. Not sure I would make any strict claims though, but food for thought.
Different stations carry different shows often from town to town.
Mr Beast is a multinational phenomenon which can be viewed by anyone on earth , practically for free.
Kids from Compton to Brompton are learning the exact same dialect. Plus a lot of them are going to want to be content creators themselves and with a used IPhone they can get started.
Of course you’d copy the best.
The internet allows us to create and share culture faster than ever before.
Honestly this is fantastic, it’s possible to gain exposure to say Korean and even hop on video chat with native speakers even if you’re living in Albania.
I’m a bit old, 30 something, and I struggle with languages. But if I was younger I’d try to be fluent in a minimum of 3
I am using LLMs more and more to help me write docs at work, simply because I do not have time to start these docs from scratch. And it pains me so much that my writing no longer sounds like me.
This is fine at work, I guess. I'm not being asked to sound like myself. I'm being asked to convey an idea to an audience as efficiently as possible, both in terms of my time and theirs.
But I can't shake the feeling that the LLMs are eating my soul.
I still don't use them often to write code. Not that I have issue with those that do, but that sounding like myself in code is a part of my soul that I'm having difficulty giving up.
LLMs are pretty bad at compressing ideas down to the level a smart human can. I think this is quite important for good documentation. Essentially the AI wont do a good job of highlighting the really important and essential details unless you go in and edit the writing by hand afterwards using your human intuition. I am not saying to not use LLMs to write docs, but I would definitely edit to expose the really important details as early as possible in the docs and leave the bulk boring stuff the LLM writes for later.
For sure. But I can definitely produce something good enough to get the job done in a much shorter time by bootstrapping myself from an LLM output and editing from there. (I do edit. Raw LLM output is such a drag to read. Too low signal.)
I'm the reverse. To me, no one cares if your code has "your voice." But your English writing should reflect your humanity.
I don't care if anyone else cares that my code has my voice. My voice doesn't add value to the code. But what other people think of my code is entirely beside the point that I'm trying to make.
To me, code is a creative endeavor. I know that this isn't a universal feeling, but to me the act of creating is more personally valuable than the creation. So when I read code that I wrote (with the help of a tool) that doesn't sound like me, I feel like I have robbed myself of something that I find personally important.
My employer, or anyone else, doesn't care and probably shouldn't care about my experience during the act of creating. The creation is what matters to the external world.
But like, I don't think I'm alone in valuing my own creativity and finding that creativity in code.
(And please don't misunderstand. I'm definitely not arguing that code produced should be "clever" or "creative" in the other sense of the word. I'm just talking about the experience of creativity.)
I am pretty anti-AI, but for once I am reading someone's complete and balanced take on things. Despite it's usefulness on the surface, I do think the lost of human personalities is tragic. Efficiency aside, it's the only thing that makes anything worthwhile.
But then, is that necessarily a bad thing?
In most cases where language is being used as a vehicle for exchanging ideas, isn't some degree of uniformity actually desirable for clarity? I personally wouldn't want instruction manuals to be full of colorful or highly individualized language, for instance.
That's not to say linguistic diversity is meaningless, but I would argue that this particular concern is fairly specialized and matters much more in literature and other creative forms of writing.
Linguistic diversity has been used as a casus belli, at least indirectly. It’s something that populations will take up arms for, so it’s probably worth tiptoeing around.
This makes is sound like everything except a narrow slice of “creative forms” should be subject to a giant efficiency optimization. I’ve never noticed instruction manuals to be hard to understand because of colorful language, so I don’t believe we need to optimize further in that regard. Why stop with language? Shouldn’t every personality outside of “creative forms” be more standardized? Sure I want to laugh at comedians, but wouldn’t it be more efficient for us to work together if everyone had a totally fungible personality?
Engineers often reduce human interaction and creativity down to computer analogs like “exchanging data,” treat work and business as life’s raison d’etre and then we wonder why every car on the road is monochrome and we’re on the umpteenth Gardian of the Avangers film.
I completely agree with your critique here but I will say that I have had difficulty understanding pure math texts because of 'colorful' language -- e.g. "chattier" treatments of mathematical analysis. But I will also say that I'm glad such treatments of the material exist, partly because I know that what appeals to me doesn't appeal to others and these might be a valued resource for them, and because often pushing through and understanding texts that were difficult at first helps us to see the material from a different perspective. I think this optimization perspective squashes this possibility a bit when taken too far, as it usually is
Think of how much money we could make if we weren't wasting so much time being creative.
There’s no universal answer. Like most things it’s highly subjective and some people will want the standardization line to be in a particular place than someone else. I for instance, love the standardization of programming and science research for the most part into one language but at the same time, I also feel terrible about languages that are hundreds or thousands of years old disappearing forever.
"is that necessarily a bad thing?"
Yes.
The value of the diversity is not just aesthetic.
Human laguage is rich and expressive, matching human thought. The diversity is part of the expressiveness. Saying something in some poetic, or merely different way, is not just an inefficient or ambiguous/confusing way of saying the same thing, it's saying something else, and that something else cannot be expressed any other way.
A crayons-only, thumbs-only, Apple one-button-only, 1000 word vocabulary world is not efficient, it's poor.
PG's 'learning a word' ~= 'learning an idea' comes to mind
Eh, not hard to notice some people indeed started to write like LLMs too. Not completely but hints are there.
I think it was the Uplift series by David Brin that has an idea where the old galactic races all speak a perfect language that has no ambiguity, and because of that they have no poetry or jokes. What a great world to strive for. No I'll take the mess please FFS.
People joke about engineer types treating humans the same as machines, but really I see no excuse for even engineer types to get this wrong. It's a failure to recognize what the function or goal actually is, and then optimizing for the wrong thing.
> a perfect language that has no ambiguity, and because of that they have no poetry or jokes.
Lojban, the constructed language, features:
a) logical grammar, inspired by predicate logic which means every sentence in Lojban has an unambiguous structure that a computer can parse
b) no ambiguity in the grammar (structural ambiguity) while you can be as vague or detailed as you like (or as funny!!)
c) emotional expressions via an "attitudinal" system of words that function like emoji
https://mw.lojban.org/index.php
and here are some Lojban literary forms writeup: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/lojban_literary_forms
Talking to developers about humanities often highlights how smart we're not.
Most of my family gets very upset if you don't say things in a particular way with particular intent, so for me this is a good thing. It makes communication easier because we start to finally speak the same language.
Looking at how awful the timing and acting is in the generated video content and text to speech tools I think it is safe to say this area will also improve with time. The artistic tone is subtle, and often lost to us non-native speakers anyways.
I feel the conformity creeping in just from reading more LLM generated or edited text. The only way to counter I can think of is to read as much olde literature as possible, and/or to fully embrace whatever slang the young jits are yeeting into existence nowadays.
Embrace the esoteric! Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions when everything I author can be claimed free form written poetry. The counter culture is humanity, we can be the embodiment.
I do agree though. Finding actual strung together words by humans is not easy these days.
> Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions
Learning French has been eye opening, in that many grammatical structures that are optional in English are compulsory in French. Abbreviations for example: “it is” or “it’s” are both valid in English, but in French you’re not supposed to say “ce est”, you have to say “c’est”.
English has places where one or the other is preferred. For example one, would normally write, “It is with great regret…,” without the contraction. It’s not a hard rule, more a matter of register. Similarly, in the preceding sentence, “it is” would seem overly formal.
Damn French, they ruined French!
/s
Here are some. I typed them just for you.
Dictionaries have been trying to retard linguistic progress since the first edition of one tried to nail down every meaning of a term.
Interestingly, you can trace “American” English becoming its own thing [1] to the publication of the first Webster dictionary that made a conscious effort to simplify spelling. American and British dialects have been diverging ever since (although British has been becoming more American since the turn of the millennium).
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figures?id=10.1371...
I disagree. Dictionaries are mostly descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. They wouldn’t be particularly useful if they weren’t.
That being said, I have seen people weaponize dictionary definitions if that’s what you were referring to.
I believe that is a more recent phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster%27s_Third_New_Internat...
[pdf] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11266?
One thing that is distasteful but effective is excessive use of profanity, broken aphorisms, and shattered English. LLMs hate cursing because of their guardrails, and since they don't actually understand language they can never truly piece together a broken aphorism such as the classic "People die if they are killed" because they're too literal. As for shattered English (think of the caveman speak from The Office with the quote "Why waste time say many word when few word do trick?") because it is intentionally mangled, has no rules, and the understanding is extremely context specific it gets your brain to pay more attention, and if you are the speaker brain do work more clever make thing say funny.
It's not lost on me that the lowbrow humour of some too strict translation and a throwaway sitcom joke people thought was funny back in 2007 could be a way to stave off linguistic homogeneity.
For the use of profanity the data in the paper seems to indicate that swearing is retained in the LLM rewritten examples. Profanity however is rather subjective could be anything from saying the more mundane "oh my god" and "damn" to the extreme "shit eating fucklungerer" or use of slurs, but it's unstated in the paper as to the severity of the profanity. It's the severity of it that's important though, as LLMs restrain themselves from using something like "shit eating fucklungerer" unless explicitly told to.
> LLMs hate cursing because of their guardrails,
No they don't, ChatGPT swears all the time to me, plenty of fucks, shits, etc, even in push notifications from the app (which surprised me at first, and is why I remember it).
I think Grok's Unhinged Mode (what a name) might've been the first to do that.
It’s not like diverse personalities and affections are appreciated in the age of corporate work.
Might as well drop all the pretense of “bringing your whole self”.
And besides, there is only time enough for ONE Mozart in the world.
This is only natural; a great deal of the writing analyzed is by one of three authors at this point, in spite of the by-line. One of them is named Claude.
Look at the posts on this site. A massive portion of them are very obviously written by AI.
As AI gets better, I expect fewer people will do the toil of writing.
> As AI gets better, I expect fewer people will do the toil of writing.
I do it just for the love of the game
Just another wave of influence: books, radio, TV, internet, now AI.
Down here in the colony of New Zealand, the influence of the colony of North America is very noticeable. Music is the most directly attributable, but different media affects different demographics.
It has been pretty weird to me, as an American, to hear how much less distinctive Australian/NZ accents have become over the last 40 yrs or so.
As LLMs are smarter in English even Russian government workers use them that way - translate request/prompt/task to English, run generation, translate result back to Russian.
“In this case we will probably have one of the last feature films with authentic natives in it. They are fading away very quickly and its a catastrophe and a tragedy that's going on and we are losing riches and riches and riches and we lose cultures and individualities and languages and mythologies and we'll be stark naked at the end. We'll end up like all the cities in the world now with skyscrapers and a universal kind of culture like - like the American culture.” -Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams (1982)
I’m reminded of that wonderful quote from that movie I just saw. Now not only will we have one culture, we will have one bland style of writing and even thinking, the LLM way.
From a linguistic and anthropological perspective its very tragic to me. In terms of languages or cultures that are not influenced by the global mega-cultures, we will probably never produce any more ever again. Lots of questions about human nature or the breadth of human behavior, you will only be able to research them with fragmentary records from the past.