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?
My question is simple.
Given humans have not already achieved this clarity of communication, when we are social animals, have been utterly dependant on each other for the entire existence of our species, the importance of communication was literally a matter of life and death, and for the vast majority of that time we only communicated through speech (written word dates to approx 4k BCE)…then why would an LLM, or any human-machine interface for that matter achieve this as a side effect of usage?
I fully accept that people, everyone, can be trained in precise speech, but we aren’t talking about purposeful training here.
Let’s not argue about the potential of “any human-machine interface”, because nobody knows how far that can go. We have an idea, but there’s still way too much we don’t understand.
You’re right, humans never have and never will alone. It’s a long shot, and as I said is pretty unlikely because the models will just get better at compensating. But I imagine if people were interacting with llms regularly - vocally - they would soon get tired of extended conversations to get what they want, and repeat training in forming those questions to an llm would maybe in turn reflect in their human interactions.