LLMs are flattening linguistic diversity, study finds
The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
A new study in Nature Human Behaviour warns that large language models are shrinking linguistic diversity. By analyzing millions of texts, researchers found that LLM-assisted writing is becoming more homogeneous, with a decline in unique vocabulary and stylistic variety. The trend is most pronounced in high-stakes domains like academic papers and job applications, raising concerns about cultural and cognitive homogenization.
The widespread adoption of LLMs is associated with a significant reduction in linguistic diversity, particularly in high-stakes written communication.
- hetman
LLMs are not the root cause here, they're just an accelerant. This was always inevitable with the progression of globalisation. Even before the internet, kids were watching Disney cartoons across the world (to be fair, often dubbed in the local language, but still an example of how global culture had been narrowing.) Perhaps this wasn't felt as strongly by those in the US quite as quickly as the rest of the world, because their culture just happened to be the source for many of these common elements.
There are always trade-offs. Globalisation has too many benefits for most to want to go back. It is up to us to intentionally cultivate our cultural uniqueness, but I'm not sure the corporate environment was ever the right place to do so, given it was already constrained by rules and etiquette, and motivated by a desire to encourage universal communication styles. Instead we have to take it upon our selves, in a very intentional way outside the corporate setting, to cultivate our own unique cultural expressions to thrive. Failure to do so either directly, or by proxy, means cultural extinction, as has been the case of many cultures that have passed before.
- patcon
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...
- 999900000999
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.
- cbarrick
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.
- ohyes
So the interesting thing is that this shrinking “linguistic diversity” is fundamental to how an LLM works.
The LLM is a big probabilistic statistical trick. It picks the next token based on certain words are simply “the best” because they are specific and well connected to other tokens. The is gives them a great overall cost function. (Basically a good score on “will it make sense in context” while also having specific meaning that makes it better than other options, unambiguous in common use and being a single token rather than several).
You can trim those tokens, but then you just get other tokens that are “the best” tokens (and you’re worse off because the output became less clear).
The cool thing is this seems to get worse the more powerful and accurate your model is, because it is picking technically / statistically perfect tokens, not tasteful ones.
- unsignedint
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.
- tednoob
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.
- bitxbitxbitcoin
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.