How often lately have you started to hear terms new to you? Maybe even from worlds you’ve been in for awhile. After my wife included the phrase, “What people don’t think about,” in a sentence, which I have done before as well. I realized that AI is having a strange impact on the English language.
It probably is not as much AI as it is Reddit. That is where AI is getting most of its information and unlike a person no one has told AI that no one talks like that in real life. So when AI tells you that today is a risk-on day in the stock market or suddenly everyone is talking about two Friday’s ago as profit taking and you think, WTF those aren’t terms I’ve ever heard in my 45 years of life and I’m not exactly ignorant of the stock market, realize it’s because you don’t use Reddit slang.
AI has never seen a card catalog. It doesn’t have access to a lot of real knowledge and as people say, garbage in garbage out. I can’t say my brain is much better. I spend too much time on social media too, and the real danger now is not AI continuing to learn from sub-optimal sources it is that AI is now part of those sources so it is becoming a feedback loop of potentially wrong information.
I do find LLM’s to be a useful tool. I have used them for everything from cooking dinner to movie and book recommendations and for learning how to do SEO. It has been helpful and it has helped us make money, but it also has a strange relationship with these decisions and it is impacting our language.
I’ve had casual conversations with people where I am suddenly using a term I think is insider speak and they look at me like a toddler and ask what the hell I meant, because Reddit is full of people pretending to be insiders and that means AI is mostly pretending to be an insider. It isn’t as smart as we think it is, and we need to recognize that when talking to it. It is a tool and will give us back out what we put into it. Unlike other tools it has to understand us before we can us it to its full potential.
David Huzzard Writes 