AI may be making us think and write more alike

https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/ai-may-be-making-us-think-and-write-more-alike/

231 247 4 months ago

dornsife.usc.edu

Subtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!

ModernMech• 4 months ago

AI doesn't have to be conscious or sentient to take over, all that needs to happen is for politicians, law enforcement, journalists, educators etc. to uncritically parrot everything it outputs. The military is already using AI to make targeting decisions. If they just go with whatever the AI says to strike, then AI is already fighting our wars.

trollbridge• 4 months ago

As a bonus, mistakes can be blamed on AI.

misterflibble12• 4 months ago

The scary thing is that AI decision making has been infiltrating society for decades as an unseen entity.

jerrygarcia• 4 months ago

I often wonder if the popularity of LLMs among company executives is that they are the perfect yes men.

They rarely disagree with any idea or proposal, providing a salve for the insecurities of their users.

davebren8• 4 months ago

I was listening to one of Altman's more recent interviews and it sounded like he himself has LLM induced psychosis.

misterflibble12• 4 months ago

Definitely see our internal company agents enforcing the status quo!

MattGaiser• 4 months ago

And I would bet he judges your work with AI, assigns you work generated by AI, and perhaps evaluates whether you yourself use enough AI.

misterflibble12• 4 months ago

That's exactly what he does...wtf are you spying on me?? Lol but seriously, I don't know how to handle his AI delegation

eru4• 4 months ago

Well, has it been an improvement?

misterflibble12• 4 months ago

No that's why I'm complaining

tcp_handshaker• 4 months ago

Have you tried to prompt inject your team leader? It works wonderfully with mine.

SecretDreams• 4 months ago

I would be looking for another job.

I'm fine with using LLMs as coding tools. But I find it deeply offensive when someone is very explicitly using them to communicate with me.

Communication is such a deeply human experience. It lets people feel each other out, and learn things beyond just the words being said. To have that filtered out by an LLM is just disgraceful.

misterflibble12• 4 months ago

Yes exactly and I am actively applying for jobs. But I feel like the next job will also have this nonsense behaviour

sumeno• 4 months ago

Good luck finding a company that doesn't have these people if LLMs are used

lamasery5• 4 months ago

I think you're gonna struggle to find companies that aren't infested with this kind of thing.

Observing the effect of LLMs on the "business side" of things, I'm increasingly thinking of these as a kind of infection against which the MBA set and their acolytes have no immune response, and I think it's going to eat a large proportion of the benefit of LLMs to most businesses (possibly overwhelming it and actually harming productivity, will depend on how much better these tools get).

LLMs are awesome at bloating your slide decks while making them really slick and complete-looking. They're great at suggesting an entire set of features on a ticket you've just barely started writing ...but did you actually want all those? You end up with redundant or in-context-gibberish features that leave the person actually doing the work tracking down WTF actually matters. They are adding overhead to communication, so far, not just by puffing up and padding language (which isn't great either) but by adding noise "content" that can't be stripped out without talking to the person who created it and making sure that was actually just AI bullshit and not something they actually needed; that is, you can't just do the "LLM, summarize this" trick, because the author used an LLM to plan it, too, not just to pad-out and gussy-up something they actually thought through and wrote.

LLMs are letting people present very convincingly as having a more-complete understanding of what's going on than they really do in ways that are messing up productive work, I'm not sure business-folks are going to be generally capable of tamping this down because it is so in-line with the way they already operate (but on speed), and helps them so very much to look good to one another while saving tons of time. This isn't just the MBA set I accuse above, either, I'm noticing that this improbably-complete deck communication upward is becoming necessary to look competent (and to ladder-climb) as an IC.

Like, I'm only starting to think this through and really observing what's going on through this lens as I've only noticed it in the last few weeks, but the more I see the more alarming this is. I think this is going to be a little like the largely-wasteful "legibility" obsession of upper management, something enabled by computerization that they find irresistible and are pretty bad at employing judiciously and effectively, but probably a lot worse in terms of harm-to-productivity, and directly affecting and changing the behavior of far more layers of an organization. They never (businesses as a whole, to anthropomorphize a bit) gained wisdom with their new powers to burn resources chasing legibility, and this is starting to look like another thing they just will not be able to use (internally! I don't even mean for actually producing external-facing results!) with restraint and taste.

ge962• 4 months ago

I was talking to managers and they were talking about how they'd use AI to write reviews about their employees to which I said I would not like a non-genuine review/not personal.

Their rational is coming off more professional

beached_whale• 4 months ago

This is one of my fears with this, losing ones voice. Everyone's expression distilled to the mean. This has ramifications in things like recognizing if a person is who they say they are too. At least currently, it is punished/shunned to sound like an LLM, but it's well within reason to see that shift to individuality being penalized.

misterflibble12• 4 months ago

I think corporations will start penalizing first, they're already doing that to some extent at my work because they want their in-house agents to only review our PRs.

nusl2• 4 months ago

https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/

thatjoeoverthr• 4 months ago

I've been calling them "meat condoms". In the workplace, it's one or two warnings before completely ejecting them. On social media, instant block.

misterflibble12• 4 months ago

That's terrific lol thanks for the link BTW!

Izkata2• 4 months ago

> The experience is strange; you aren't able to grasp any common human aspects because there are none. You can't reason with the human, because the human isn't doing the reasoning. You can't appeal to it, because the LLM behind it is in direct support of its own and the proxy's opinions and whims.

I've sometimes wondered if the chat context is why some people think LLMs are intelligent, it being divorced from their usual experiences, and they need something like this to feel the cognitive dissonance before they can notice LLM shortcomings.

avaer3• 4 months ago

Just because thoughts are translated doesn't mean they are consumed in the process.

However I don't doubt many "team leaders" can and should be replaced with LLMs.

nidnogg2• 4 months ago

Guilty as charged. In my mind, when I'm insecure about a response or if I don't have enough expertise in the topic at hand I end up running it through an LLM. Lately I've been really trying harder to keep my original ideas as much as possible. I'm seeing a bit of an improvement, but still early to tell

aceazzameen• 4 months ago

You have to make some mistakes in your communication (or anything) if you ever want to grow and learn.

embedding-shape• 4 months ago

"running it through an LLM" doesn't mean "Give LLM my text -> Copy-paste the output of the LLM" does it? Checking against an LLM then using your own voice feels completely fine, just another type of validation before you share something, but if you actually let the LLM rewrite what you say, then I feel like that's beyond "running it through an LLM", it's basically letting the LLM write your text for you instead of just checking/validating.

watwut4• 4 months ago

That is completely opposite of how I use LLM. If I do not have expertise, I ignore LLM and search for more trustworthy resource. LLM lie very confidently and if I do not have expertise, they will lie to me.

When I do have expertise, I use them because I am able to check.

ge962• 4 months ago

Man that's so annoying I have a similar problem our devops person I ask question to literally gives me AI responses

Also annoying to me working with a "partner" non-technical they just send me an LLM dump of how to do something

I was trying to explain it to them in an analogy like showing up to a mechanic and telling them what to do based on what ChatGPT said

oddsockmachine• 4 months ago

I'm dealing with the same nonsense. I get LLM-generated reviews of my work, documents, and plans which are not grounded in reality or nuance. Regularly have to explain why the AI is wrong. I was told I should run my docs through the LLM to make them read better. But they're not even being read by humans at this point.

downboots• 4 months ago

It's not explanation — it's relabeling. Why it matters:

axpvms• 4 months ago

You're absolutely right

kif• 4 months ago

Great point — this is the smoking gun

oceansky• 4 months ago

Wasted the opportunity of using an em dash instead of an en dash in the title.

adriand• 4 months ago

I always wonder if competitive market dynamics will solve problems like these, at least to some extent and for some people, because the people who retain the ability to communicate in a distinctive, persuasive and original style will be rewarded. Corporate dronespeak is no less homogeneous than AI writing, and companies with this communication style are regularly disrupted by nimbler, more authentic-sounding competitors.

alexchantavy• 4 months ago

I sure hope so. The way companies are pressured to hit growth numbers, I really hope messaging in general doesn’t all get sloppified along with code lol.

I think AI writing makes humanities and writing courses more important, and I hope people maintain their sense of taste with writing, but tbh I’m not optimistic here.

rdevilla• 4 months ago

This state of affairs presages the advent of a second dark age - one that will forever eclipse the era of radical openness & transparency that once served the software community for decades. Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM whok would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale, until any possible information asymmetries have been arbitraged away. The development & secrecy of technique will once again become a deep moat as LLMs fall into local, suboptimal minima, trained on and marketed towards the lowest common denominator. The Internet, or at least, The Web, becomes a Dark Forest of the Dead Internet (Theory), in which humans fear of speaking out and capturing the attention of the LLM who would siphon their creative essence for more, ever more training data. Interaction contracts into small meshes of trusted, verifiably human participants to keep the tides of spamslop at bay. Quasi-monastic orders that still scribe with pen and paper emerge, that believe there is still value in training and educating a human mind and body.

- Unknown, 19 Feb 2026

existsdaily• 4 months ago

Scary... where can I find more of that?

danielbln• 4 months ago

There were no "dark ages", that's the same common wisdom blunder like "in the middle ages everybody was dressed in drab grey clothing, ate gruel and walked through mountains of poop everywhere". It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today. It was by no means a time of standstill.

eru4• 4 months ago

As far as I can tell, the dark ages were called the dark ages because there wasn't much evidence to be found: writing was less prominent during that time.

It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today.

You are seeing the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire a bit too rosy. Compare and contrast https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

azan_4• 4 months ago

Yes, Europe did not have dark ages, it only had period of population decline, of less emissions, less building, less inventions, less records and severed trade networks.

GeoAtreides• 4 months ago

I am very sorry, but you are wrong. Between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Carolingian empire (~800 AD) there was a period of not only standstill, but regression, devolution and forgetfulness. Compared with what came before, it can be rightly called the dark ages.

npsomaratna• 4 months ago

Somehow made me think of Warhammer 40k (maybe pre men of iron?)

plasticchris• 4 months ago

It’s a recurring theme, see dune’s references to Samuel Butler.

SkyeCA• 4 months ago

Interaction contracts into small meshes of trusted, verifiably human participants to keep the tides of spamslop at bay

This is already happening and you don't have to look far to find it.

Personally HN is the only site I browse and comment on anymore (and I'm on here less than I once was). The vast, vast majority of my time online is spent in walled off Discords and Matrix chats where I know everyone and where there's a high bar to add new people. I have no real interest in open communities anymore.

avaer3• 4 months ago

Directionally correct. But seems overly optimistic to think that moats can be kept from the prying eyes of LLMs, unless you're not interacting with the market at all.

davebren8• 4 months ago

Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM who would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale

I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on. I'm not sure of any way I can share it with humans and only humans. If I let the LLMs have the UI patterns and libraries I've developed it would dilute my IP, like it has Studio Ghibli's art style.

TeMPOraL7• 4 months ago

It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.

reaperducer• 4 months ago

I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on.

Same here.

I no longer post photos, code, or pretty much anything other than short comments on the internet.

I'm not going to do free work for trillion-dollar AI companies.

I do, however, find it interesting to watch AI destroy the whole "content creation" industry.

All of the "creators" and "influencers" and "I wanna be a YouTube star when I grow up" people are all going to have to look for real jobs soon.

I've seen in the newspaper that there are real companies paying real money for fake AI-generated "influencers" to flog their products.

Why pay dollars to a wannabe, when you can pay pennies to an AI corp?

fsflover2• 4 months ago

there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on

Could you publish under AGPLv3, so any AI users with recognizable patterns from your code can get in trouble?

Cosi1125• 4 months ago

Quasi-monastic orders that still scribe with pen and paper emerge, that believe there is still value in training and educating a human mind and body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem#Plot_summary

shagie3• 4 months ago

A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - https://apnews.com/article/typewriter-ai-cheating-chatgpt-co...

    The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging at the end of each line.

    Once each semester, Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University, introduces her students to the raw feeling of typing without online assistance. No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers or delete keys.

    The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments.

supliminal• 4 months ago

Sounds lifted from Alpha Centauri

Ferret7446• 4 months ago

Most people don't care, provably from historical data. And trying to keep secret knowledge is a losing battle; as the saying goes, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

Look how well that strategy served Claude with the recent source code leak

anizan• 4 months ago

Social media is a tool for perpetuating monothought

mhl47• 4 months ago

Social Media creates distinctive Filter Bubbles. A dominant LLM company (or multiple aligned ones) create one way of thinking.

paganel• 4 months ago

contributed to the research, which was supported by funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

I guess when they're not busying bombing train infrastructure in Iran they have some money left to give to some propagandizing about AI. Always try to stay on top of the game!

tom-blk• 4 months ago

This is undoubtedly the case and imo quite concerning. Hard to minimize the effects as well, personally speaking.

hexaga• 4 months ago

Try hate; it will do. But most will love it instead and you would be driven apart from them.

api• 4 months ago

Compared to social media, probably for the better.

dist-epoch• 4 months ago

The team points to multiple studies showing that LLM outputs are less varied than human-generated writing and that LLM outputs tend to reflect the language, values and reasoning styles of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. ... The researchers say that AI developers should intentionally incorporate diversity in language, perspectives and reasoning into their models.

Which is why Altman says Saudi Arabia should have it's own Sovereign AI cloud. Why should LLMs reflect democratic societies views on man and woman for example? They should also reflect the perspectives on man and woman that Saudi Arabia has, especially to local people. Western views should not be imposed on the rest of the world.

uncanny2• 4 months ago

I have made an observation that others have not discussed, that the real gem of our collective LLM experience is the proper documentation of “skills.”

Am I the only one who has noticed that the proper documentation of skills we do for LLMs after so many decades of neglecting junior and mid level roles are the real work?

We carefully explain to our LLMs policies, procedures, and practices which for generations before we have vaguely arbitrarily and ambiguously expected each human role to “figure out” for themselves?

Simply as a catalog of expectations our experiences have been valuable, apart from the “automated” aspects the LLms provide.

lamasery5• 4 months ago

One of the ways I think the effect of LLMs on productivity (in software, anyway) will be tempered is that the work required to use them effectively & safely is all work we were supposed to be doing, but largely were not, at least not as completely as we aspired to. Exactly what you mention, much more detailed and thought-through feature requests, more-complete and higher-quality test suites, large and high-quality test datasets, documentation, thorough code review, all that stuff, all of it falling well under what we "should" be doing at every place I've ever worked, in terms both of quality and amount of it that we did.

They won't accelerate software development to the degree naïve analysis might suggest without significantly harming quality and reliability unless we start doing all those things we've been neglecting much better, which adds more work... with the result that I think our diverging paths here are "much worse software, made faster" or "software at least as good, with better supporting artifacts, but barely, if at all, faster to develop"

stared• 4 months ago

You are absolutely right!

Brendinooo3• 4 months ago

I would imagine a similar critique was leveled at the written word when it was starting to supplant oral cultures.

eru4• 4 months ago

Well, Plato's sock puppet Socrates famously opposed writing with pretty much these arguments.

Brendinooo3• 4 months ago

Yup.

And to be clear, maybe some things were genuinely lost when we switched to the written word. But I have to believe it was a net gain.

Time will tell if that's true here as well.

plastic-enjoyer• 4 months ago

No, he did not and it would be good if people would have _actually_ read Plato's Phaedrus before regurgitating the same nonsense every time someone has a critical perspective on LLM writings.

jessep• 4 months ago

Yeah, I’ve notice that people have started to sound like LLMs even when the LLMs aren’t writing for them. Not stupid people. Not lazy people. Some of the smartest people I know —- I can’t figure out how to use an em dash here, but you get the point.

drtz• 4 months ago

This could also be explained by the frequency illusion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

mckirk• 4 months ago

If writing goes the way music seems to be going with Angine de Poitrine gaining a huge following as a kind of allergic reaction of people against the 'AI sameness'... then we could be in for a wild ride.

On the other hand, music is primarily an art form and writing (nowadays) is primarily utilitarian I would contend, so maybe the analogy doesn't quite hold up.

masswerk• 4 months ago

No diverging opinions, no unexpected critique, but universal basic intelligence. And here is the kicker: we won't even notice.

Here's an easy three-step plan to unanimous democracy:

• ask your LLM

• don't edit — the LLM has already selected the most average and most plausible opinion for you

• give it your voice, your voice matters

Learn to anticipate — there may not always be a power bank to keep your phone from running low!

stabbles2• 4 months ago

Oh no, LLMs threaten our individuality ⸻ what will we do?!

compounding_it• 4 months ago

People are unloading the cognitive load onto the LLM. Probably because life stress is causing them to rely on technology to bring relief. It may not necessarily be a great choice.

everdrive3• 4 months ago

So too did the printing press. Again, this is not a "something similar has happened in the past, therefore this is nothing new" sort of comment.

This is quite new, however this outcome was totally unavoidable -- once methods of communication become widespread and centralized it is impossible for them not to impact language and thought.

rimliu2• 4 months ago

how exactly the printing press did that?

everdrive3• 4 months ago

It's actually an interesting topic, the printing press fostered a great normalization of the English language that was not previously present.

https://academic.oup.com/book/41217/chapter-abstract/3506879...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

SketchySeaBeast5• 4 months ago

On the contrary, the printing press enabled people to quickly spread new ideas. Protestantism was enabled by it. That was quite the schism in thinking.

everdrive3• 4 months ago

Definitely agreed -- I wasn't precise enough when making my point, but I think your point is absolutely correct.

robofanatic• 4 months ago

Well, in few years not sure I will know how to think any more. If I am stuck on something I just ask the LLM and get the solution. While this shortcut sometimes saves me a ton of time and headaches, I miss that long route of thinking and getting to a solution myself. Maybe in future we will have gyms for brain workouts… I don’t know

ori_b• 4 months ago

Knowing people have gone full "LLM-brain", it's not subtle.

sobiolite• 4 months ago

Human communication and reasoning is the end result of billions of years of evolution. I'd be very surprised if LLMs can fundamentally alter it in a few years.

When considering phenomenon like these, I think people seriously underestimate what I'd call the "fashion effect". When a new technology, medium or aesthetic appears, it can have a surprisingly rapid influence on behaviour and discourse. The human social brain seems especially susceptible to novelty in this way.

Because the effects appear so fast and are often so striking, even disturbing, due to their unfamiliarity, it is tempting to imagine that they represent a fundamental transformation and break from the existing technological, social and moral order. And we extrapolate that their rapid growth will continue unchecked in its speed and intensity, eventually crowding out everything that came before it.

But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity.

LLMs will certainly have an effect on how humans reason and communicate, but the idea that they will so effortlessly reshape it is, in my opinion, rather naive. The comments in this thread alone prove that LLM-speak is already a well-recognised dialect replete with clichés that most people will learn to avoid for fear of looking bad.

jplusequalt• 4 months ago

But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity

The internet didn't follow this trajectory. Neither did smart phones.

Surprise, surprise, it's the same people trying to make AI entrenched into our society.

davebren8• 4 months ago

There's plenty of people communicating more with LLMs than humans right now, of course it's going to have an effect because our language and thought patterns are extremely adaptive to our environment. The communication system we are born with is extremely bare-bones/general so that it can absorb whatever language and culture we are born into.

shimman4• 4 months ago

Those people tend to suffer from AI psychosis, and I don't think it's a thing you'd want to admit publicly that you don't interact with any humans and prefer the company of machines (let us also ignore that such people wouldn't be in public to begin with).

I can't image such people are living meaningful lives in any capacity. They're up there with consumers that think the only purpose in life is to cheerlead for a corporation and buy their wares.

mpalmer2• 4 months ago

Think of all the things that took hundreds/thousands/millions of years to develop and mature, which humans have managed to destroy in relatively short order.

Every 50 years we cycle out an entirely new batch of thinking humans. What cognitive legacy is it exactly that you think is going to be self-preserving?

TeMPOraL7• 4 months ago

You're talking about system altering the environment. GP was talking about the system altering itself. The system is a massive self-stabilizing collection of feedback loops. Unlike the static environment[0], it's incredibly hard to intentionally move such system to a different equilibrium. If it weren't, we'd already solved all the thorny world problems long ago.

[0] - Any self-stabilizing system that operates much slower than us - such as ecosystems or climate - is, from our perspective, static.

Jerrrrrrrry• 4 months ago

Plato said the same thing.

dfxm123• 4 months ago

Fads are often driven by moneyed interests. AI is no different. As long as guys Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. are trying to bend the world to their will, and as long as they have the resources to do so, AI will be zeitgeist for just as long. On a smaller scale, this extends even to a CEO outsourcing support to AI, etc.

konschubert• 4 months ago

Social media has shaped us. Why should AI not do the same?

It may finally [help us fix out the bullshit asymmetry](https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2026/03/31/ai-the-bullshi...) that has been exacerbated by social media.

If AI can provide us with a shared source of truth, it will be a big improvement over whatever twitter is doing to people.

And strangely, all these models seem to converge to a shared epistemology.

normalaccess• 4 months ago

There is a reason Coke spends ~ 5 billion dollars worldwide on advertising sugar water... It works.

Monkey see monkey do. Simple as that.

yojo• 4 months ago

I caught myself saying “you’re absolutely right” to my wife last night, unironically. This was 100% not in my vocabulary six months ago.

If I spend 40 hours a week talking to anybody, some of their language or mannerisms are going to rub off on me. I can’t think of a compelling reason why a human-sounding chat bot would be any different.

stabbles2• 4 months ago

Another one I noticed is "or maybe I hallucinated that" instead of "or maybe I dreamed that". Researchers will be horrified to learn that even talk about LLMs affects people's vocabulary.

Izkata2• 4 months ago

Almost two decades ago I watched all of Farscape in under two weeks during a college winter break. I often still reflexively say "frell" instead of "fuck".

ThrowawayR2• 4 months ago

It's obviously untrue that technology can't fundamentally alter human communication in a few years. For example, the advent of film, then radio, and finally television caused a convergence of culture at the national and even global level. Characters like Mickey Mouse and the cast of Star Trek are instantly recognized internationally, even to those who never have seen any of the works they star in. There likely isn't anyone here who doesn't remember some catchy commercial jingle of their youth or catchphrase from media that entered the national lexicon. And yes, it also affected reasoning: Walter Cronkite, a long ago TV journalist, was labelled "the most trusted man in America" for the integrity of his reporting. The internet caused a second wave of transformation since it was many-to-many communication instead of unidirectional broadcasting that allowed the coalescence of subcultures, examples being various fandoms and, infamously, 4chan.

gabbagool• 4 months ago

The first thing I thought when I read the abstract of the underlying paper was that this sounds like "model collapse" at the society level.

I don't feel super confident that we'll "soon" find ourselves in a world where there is no variance left in thought (would that be the net effect of total model/epistemic collapse?), though if you do accept that there could be any loss of variance due to AI, perhaps it's not unreasonable to consider how much and how quickly could this happen?

All this is by way of saying, I don't think it's wrong to ask these kinds of questions and think deeply about the consequences of societal shifts like this.

simplyluke2• 4 months ago

Fashion seems like the right analogy. I think about how many sentences I speak today that would have been incompressible to me ~15 years ago and not even due to recent events/technology, but just because our slang/humor has evolved during that time.

The flip side is the same thing was true then, and we aren't making a lot of jokes about the narwhal baconing at midnight these days.

jdub• 4 months ago

Young singers brought up listening to autotuned vocals can unknowingly learn and emulate the sonic signature of the tuning algorithm (and the telltale lilt when it's used as an effect, but the subtle tuning case is more surprising).

If you read too much sloppy LLM prose, it's going to influence how you write and structure your own.

nitwit005• 4 months ago

Technologies often have rapid, and obvious, effects on writing. The telegraph services charged by the word, so an abbreviated style that became known as "telegraphese", developed.

And it doesn't have to be that direct. Novels have been hugely influenced by films.

indrex• 4 months ago

…and the first paragraph has an em dash

jeffwask2• 4 months ago

Take a community with AI moderation like Reddit, I've been a participant for years. With the recent push to AI autocorrect and moderation, you can see the changes in language. New words, new ways of speaking, unconsciously editing yourself because you don't want to draw the eye of the bot. It doesn't feel subtle. It feels Orwellian.

RobotToaster• 4 months ago

It's particularly egregious on youtube, where people frequently use words like "unalived" or "self-deleted" instead of murder or suicide, lest they incur the wrath of the almighty algorithm.

SketchySeaBeast5• 4 months ago

That seems to me to be an example where the language is forced to change but the thoughts remain the same. Sure, people are using the "safe" terms, but they're using them to continue to subvert the rules, not to bow to them.

jeffwask2• 4 months ago

This was the first change that came to mind and one of the more drastic changes.

BoneShard2• 4 months ago

Youtube comments is a separate genre itself. Due to youtube moderation policy - music video comments are all the same, same tired jokes, patterns. Not an AI slop per se, but feels the same.

kjkjadksj4• 4 months ago

I recently had a comment removed by reddit. It wasn’t even against the rules. It was anti establishment is all. I insulted the billionaire class in that comment. Class division style comments are now banned. Wouldn’t want revolution on a for profit forum now would we?

AlexandrB2• 4 months ago

That's surprising because reddit moderation usually tends the other way and any objection to some part of the omnicause gets you banned.

giancarlostoro3• 4 months ago

English is not my first language, but when I started using Firefox with the built-in spell correction, I firmly believe my ability to spell words went drastically up. My grammar is stiff iffy, like I'm pretty sure I do comma splices everywhere, but at least most people can understand what I say now compared to when I was 13 and on the internet.

If there was a "gramma nazi" teenie tiny LLM with a total focus on English grammar only, and you baked that into every browser, I feel like my grammar would improve slightly. Word does it to an extent, but I don't use Word nearly enough for it to be meaningful. Firefox text spell checking was on 98% of the things I used online.

Joel_Mckay• 4 months ago

Some play this everyday, as vocabulary will improve in time =3

https://play.freerice.com

rimliu2• 4 months ago

did you mean "grammar nazi"? /s

giancarlostoro3• 4 months ago

Typo funnily enough.

lamasery5• 4 months ago

A ton of "incorrect" comma usage isn't even (historically) wrong, actually, it's just currently unfashionable.

There was a reaction in the last century against poor writers with poor taste over-using punctuation and writing ugly, long sentences. The result was stern advice to students to eliminate punctuation and cut sentences up into tiny bits. These same students came out of this process believing this was correct writing, not a straight-jacket put on them to keep them from hurting themselves. They unthinkingly cite Hemingway and borrow his clout, I suppose judging almost all writing before Hemingway and most after him, up until the 80s or 90s, as "bad" even when it's the work of masters. They blame the author when their stunted literacy (learning to write can hardly be separated from learning to read, at least at the more-advanced end of "to read") leaves them, as adults, struggling with texts once meant for children.

kjkjadksj4• 4 months ago

Anyone who reads hemingway in 2026 would not struggle with literacy as an adult.

crooked-v• 4 months ago

stunted literacy

I think that's got more to do with schools just literally not teaching students to read in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_cueing

nonameiguess• 4 months ago

I'm not going to say with 100% confidence that spellcheck never teaches anyone anything, but you have to beware of basic post hoc ergo propter hoc here. Virtually everyone's spelling improves between age 13 and adulthood.

giancarlostoro3• 4 months ago

I would intentionally tell myself how to correctly spell the words, but that is fair.

nickphx• 4 months ago

Who is "us"?

CompoundEyes• 4 months ago

An aspect of LLMs that I like is the specificity in word choice. One well defined word can be an alias for a couple sentences of explanation that human might not have pulled out of the air in that moment.

It reminds me of the wheel of emotions. If people absorb a wider palette of words communication might benefit. https://www.isu.edu/media/libraries/counseling-and-testing/d...

svachalek• 4 months ago

This is a fair point. When people talk about LLM writing they're always picking on its visible tics and clear flaws. It's a lot more uncomfortable to talk about the things it does better than most of us. There is a lot of precision in how they choose words and phrasing, especially top models like Opus. Lately I've had Opus explain some things to me I've never really been able to grasp otherwise, in fairly concise conversations.

davebren8• 4 months ago

This is my current fear, even if I choose not to use it if everyone around me does their way of speaking is all going to become more chatbot-esque. It already seems to be transferring to people its false sense of confidence, and its lack of reasoning ability. The corporate demand to participate in this is something I can't do, the cost is our humanity.

I guess one hope for luddites is that we can stay tethered by reading pre-LLM books and other content.

kusokurae• 4 months ago

On a creative level, I remember McCarthy describing scalped heads as like wet polyps blue in the moonlight. The more generic ways of describing something like that would never give me such a visceral reaction to the violence he was trying to tell me something about.

I already lose interest reading books where the phrases are recycled and the max sentencelength for the whole book grazes 40.

If people communicate to me without personality through prompt wastrelry I'll discount theirs and wait till they're willing to actually have an opinion. In this specific context style and substance tend to come in a pair or not at all. If you can't beat 'em you can at least filter 'em out.

taco_emoji• 4 months ago

Can't affect you if you don't use it

iainctduncan• 4 months ago

One has only to compare blogs and "thought leadership" posts from now and five years ago to see this is already happening, and big time.

tarkin2• 4 months ago

People from a nation think and write alike because they share a common canon of literature and stories.

It's just a pity AI was trained on mindless, garbage business-speak, and now that's our globalised common literature.

And now we're feeding that regurgitated mindless, garbage business-speak back into AI models, thereby reinforcing the garbage and further rotting our minds.

break_the_bank• 4 months ago

Wrote about this a while ago actually; I called it the Billion Steve problem - https://x.com/gyani1595/status/2034652087494090829

BoneShard2• 4 months ago

I'm sorry it feels like an AI wrote it, at least partially.

dfxm123• 4 months ago

Large language models may be standardizing human expression

I think it is important to distinguish "human expression" from copying a response from an LLM. Someone who outsources their thinking to an LLM is only offering an AI's expression. It's not human expression.

incomingpain2• 4 months ago

The LLM people call it "safety" but in reality its censorship and conformity. Yet, it's trivial to get them to talk about how to make a bomb or whatever. It's mostly political in nature.

https://www.trackingai.org/political-test

You dont accidentally end up entirely left wing libertarian.

lamasery5• 4 months ago

That quadrant is where basically all "Western" mainstream academia sits, and has for quite a long time, and they write an awful lot.

I am a little surprised that the influence of online "influencer"-speak and marketing, being so voluminous and evident in the things' writing styles, hasn't dragged them other directions, though. Nor the enormous amount of socially authoritarian social media posting. I suppose the former is so empty of actual philosophical content (or, indeed, anything of substance) that it might have little effect, but the latter... that's weird. Maybe they're down-ranking by tone (angrier = lower-rank) which would sharply elevate academic-style writing, assuring a tendency toward economically-left liberalism.

incomingpain2• 4 months ago

I dont agree with the premise that is where academia sits. University of Dallas or University of Calgary is not going to show up in the far left. Not to mention religious universities like Redeemer in Hamilton.

In fact, it should balance out, especially over centuries of global content. There's absolutely no chance that the training data itself is the bias. IT's the filtering and labelling of the content that introduces the bias.

The AI companies are taking left wing content and labelling them "high quality prestige" and then looking at right wing content and labelling it "opinion low quality" or whatever. That is where the bias is occurring.

mplanchard• 4 months ago

A really aggravating thing about seeing so much AI-generated text around is that it makes me constantly second-guess my own writing. Does that sentence sound natural? Am I veering into ChatGPT territory? God forbid I use an em-dash. And how much of the perception of it "feeling" like AI text is real vs. paranoia?

It's incredibly frustrating, but maybe a silver lining is that it will help me write more authentically, I don't know.

pdimitar3• 4 months ago

While I cringe at most LLM speak, I have learned quite a bit from it. Certain terminology and some gaps in my entirely self-learned English. I appreciate that. It helped me better express myself at work and use less words (but hopefully more substantive ones).

But yeah, their general tone is very... castrated. Safe. Hugely impersonal.

I have learned to quickly edit out their suggested comments when I ask for an advice.

To me they have been a positive -- after careful curation.

kjkjadksj4• 4 months ago

You would have been better off reading good english literature to improve your own writing.

pdimitar3• 4 months ago

I can't turn back the clock and I will have to relay to my family that this month I'll get less money because I need to read English literature.

We operate within our own time and energy budgets, man. I might never get to that literature. My peaceful times in life where I could chill and choose what to do are over and I don't expect them to ever come back. Though who knows.

jerf2• 4 months ago

"say that AI developers should incorporate more real-world diversity into large language model (LLM) training sets,"

Are you kidding me?

How much more "real-world diversity" could they possibly incorporate into the models than the entire freaking Internet and also every scrap of text written on paper the AI companies could get a hold of?

How on Earth could someone think that AIs speak like this because their training set is full of LLM-speak? This is transparently obviously false.

This is the sort of massive, blinding error that calls everything else written in the article into question. Whatever their mental model of AI is it has no resemblance to reality.

exe342• 4 months ago

The problem isn't the diversity in the training set - the problem is that the method by design picks the average.

jerf2• 4 months ago

LLM speak isn't even quite the average either. It's something more like the average, then pushed through more training to turn it into the agents we think of today (a fresh-off-the-training-set LLM really is in some sense that "fancy autocomplete" that people called it for a while), then trained by the AI companies to be generally inoffensive and do the other things they want them to do. All of the further actions push the agents away from the original LLM average. The similarity of the "LLM tone" across multiple models and multiple companies, and the fact I don't think this tone has been super directly trained for, strongly suggests that the process of converting the raw LLM into the desirable agents we all use is some sort of strong strange attractor for the LLMs that are pushed through that process.

Maybe they are training for that tone now, either deliberately or accidentally. But my belief that they weren't initially comes from the fact that it's a new tone that I doubt anyone designed with deliberation. It bears strong resemblance to "corporate bland", but it is also clearly distinct from it in that we could all tell those two apart very easily.

amelius• 4 months ago

Just crank up the temperature.

beej712• 4 months ago

LLMs have felt to me like they excel in one particular skill (being able to make connections across vast amounts of knowledge) and are basically average, otherwise. If I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results.

I used Claude a lot for planning my current fun project. Good rubber duck. It liked all the suggestions I pitched for the design, but I only went with the last one after discarding the others.

The others were all fine and would have worked, but they weren't the best that I found.

Back to the point, if we're getting average guidance from the AI and we're just offloading our thinking process at that level, then I could sure see it panning out like TFA says.

2dfdxf6• 4 months ago

Agreed. The test I run is "Can it simplify a concept I know in a matter of sentences/words, better than I can?" on a subject area that requires a lot of nuance.

And to my disappointment, the LLMs never come close. They dump paragraphs upon paragraphs. I actually want to see the LLMs surprise me. But they disappoint me for what Im specifically looking for.

MathMonkeyMan2• 4 months ago

Hm I gave the prompt:

Summarize a technique for type erasure as is done in C++. Assume that your audience is familiar with all of C++'s features, but not with the technique of type erasure. The briefer the summary, the better, but don't omit any essential pieces or use vague language.

ChatGPT Plus generated a lot of text and code. Then I said:

Now please summarize using only a few sentences.

and it replied:

Type erasure wraps any concrete type `T` in a uniform container that stores a `void*` to the object plus a pointer to a type-specific static table of function pointers (the “vtable”). Each `T` provides its own table implementing required operations (destroy, copy/move, and any interface methods), and the container dispatches all behavior through that table. This lets unrelated types share a runtime interface without a common base class, with lifetime and semantics fully defined by the per-type table.

Not perfect, but pretty good.

MengerSponge• 4 months ago

It's just Gell-Mann amnesia.

simplyluke2• 4 months ago

I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results.

Industrial scale dunning kruger/gell man amnesia. We're ~5 years in to the meme of "wow, every white collar profession other than MINE is doomed. But yeah, mine requires really specific domain knowledge, taste, and problem solving, so I'm not super worried about it but it's a very helpful tool"

whstl• 4 months ago

The expectations are just too low for LLMs.

It’s like a children or a puppy. People get impressed and go “how cute” at anything it does.

I see designers and PMs vibe coding shit that they would complain for days if it was delivered by a developer. I see C-Levels delivering reports that would make them eviscerate some intern.

efsavage2• 4 months ago

I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.

I think the value we're losing is where people are bad at things, which is often where new ideas/approaches come from, but this is a macro metric, so it's a hard sell to the person struggling when there's an easy button available.

0xffff2• 4 months ago

I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.

That's pretty much the definition of "average" (as most commonly used, to refer to "mean" rather than median or much less commonly mode), isn't it?

2dfdxf6• 4 months ago

This has always been true for any new technology. However, what's bizarre here is, billions and potentially trillions are being dumped into learning this the hard way.

There's a reason why specialisation is a thing and has driven economies forward for the better part of the last century. This is not going away. 'Democractisation' is a pipe-dream and frankly it should be - equal opportunity not equal outcome.

IlyaIvanov0• 4 months ago

The most interesting finding here is that LLMs make individuals generate more ideas but make groups generate fewer. The individual effect, in my own experience, depends entirely on how you use the tool. If you treat the first answer as the answer, you get the homogenization the article describes. If you use the LLM to attack your own framing from angles you wouldn't reach alone, you end up closer to first principles, not further. Same tool, opposite outcomes. The discipline is what differs, and most people probably default to the first mode.

rob_c• 4 months ago

I know many people from the continent who sound American because they learned ENGLISH language that way... yes it's strange how the world of communication centres around the world of discourse...

This isn't new. But nice to see more social sciences joining the party on the LLM bandwagon.

yamamura_thinks• 4 months ago

Indeed. Everything will become uniform.

jbethune• 4 months ago

Anecdotally I can say this is true both in education and software development. The diversity of approaches and writing styles among junior developers used to be fun to observe and mentor. Now with everyone using AI coding agents there is a same-y-ness to people's work that makes it harder to see what the writer actually knows or doesn't know. A friend of mine who teaches high school English has said the same thing about student work.

hknceykbx• 4 months ago

No shit

stackedinserter• 4 months ago

The problem is that we do want us to look, think and act alike. Mostly in corpo environment, but it spills into our "free" hours.

booleandilemma• 4 months ago

Speak for yourself (literally?). I don't use LLMs for my writing or editing, ever.

carabiner• 4 months ago

He's absolutely right, and that's not just insightful, that's prescient.

nayuki• 4 months ago

AI may be making us think and write more alike

Many technologies have been doing that for centuries. For example: The printing press making books available to the masses, standardized spelling in English (it was a mess before!), radio and TV broadcasting speech thus creating more uniform accents nationwide, the Internet spreading all kinds of information globally instantly, even memes (literally thinking and writing alike).

tines• 4 months ago

Yeah, that doesn't mean it's not a bad thing.

crabl• 4 months ago

this is why it's so critical (IMO) to find ways to tune the models to produce more out-of-distribution outputs. it's incredibly easy to generate "in-distribution" text and the major labs are optimizing for this because of "safety", but the only way to generate truly creative outputs is to step in and out of the fringe.

raincole• 4 months ago

I agree. The AI witch hunting has made people abandoned em-dashes. It also made me abandoned listing. At this point it will make us abandoned any structural writing in a few years.

Fricken• 4 months ago

Sure, the written word helped us to think and write more alike. The the Gutenberg press, radio and moving pictures, and then the internet. Modernity is an ognoing acti of cultural genocide that swallows everybody up and blends all human culture together into an undifferentiated grey goo.

Several years ago I visited Flores Island, which is part of the Indonesian archipelago and the place where Archeologists discovered Hobbit man. The Island is only 150 km long but it's inhabitants speak 5 distinct languages and 80-something dialects.

asdfman123• 4 months ago

Honestly, that's a totally valid concern. Let's delve into it.

itmitica• 4 months ago

Calligraphy did not get stolen from individuals and put into typewriters, it got replaced by letters with a purpose. Did that make us more alike? No, it got us more connected. Is connectivity making us more alike? If it does, is it a bad thing? Then science is a bad byproduct of this connectivity. Or any rules: driving rules, laws, airports, hotels. What is this bullshit, targeting AI for a natural human convergence instinct? I suspect riding the anti-AI wagon is profitable and draws likes and follows but narrowing vision is not the way.

AI may be making us think and write more alike

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