Great Shifting Vowels, Sirrah!

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Number One Son and I were talking earlier about AI forms of English, and how the tropes that A.I uses in its use of the language are detectable, given that one knows something less than trivial about the stylistics of normal human usages. There is a piece in the Weekend FT of 29/30th August by Elaine Moore on this very subject. NOS pointed out that such odd stylistic traits are possibly now re-entering human speech through a process of normalisation through exposure - errant feedback loops, anyone? [cf. blog posts passim] - which in turn will be further internalised by the LLMs that are feeding off our own usages of the English - or any other language, for that matter - regurgitating and amplifying said tropes on the way. All well and good whilst there are still those of us around who know differently; those of us born and raised before the A.I era. But:

What about those who are being born into this era of mutant and mutated knowledge, who will have no other context in which to frame what they see and read? We are already at a point where there are adults who are teaching today's children about modern history when they themselves were not alive when the terror attack on the Twin Towers happened; which to someone of my generation happened relatively recently. As time moves on, historical events become abstracted, and as time moves on, language mutates. Over time, languages shift naturally, due to changes in society, religion, population movements and fashion.

Hitherto, this has been an entirely human process, but now it would seem that our creation - our creation - of LLMs and generalised A.I, is entering this arena of linguistic mutation as an active agent of change, as has been seen in the House of Commons in the last couple of years: as AI is used to 'create' speeches, the very stylistic tropes it generates are now entering into general human discourse. Which of course means that those very A.I Large Language Models are now re-absorbing the mutations they themselves helped to create. Whether this could be seen as a matter for concern is up to you to decide. I just find it bloody weird: but then I'm old and maybe have some slight other insight into the matter...

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