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.
On a creative level, I remember McCarthy describing scalped heads as like wet polyps blue in the moonlight. I already switch off 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. If you can't beat 'em you can at least filter 'em out.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not a fan of Altman, but it seems debatable whether LLM psychosis is psychosis if it is conducive to the subject given their environment. Which seems to be the case for Altman by some measures.
I'm sure if we took one of us back in time a couple hundred years we would be diagnosed with all sorts of machine-magic induced psychoses.
I get what you're saying, but psychosis is a very real thing that humans can fall into and I experienced it myself once.
Humility is the real cure, and there is a way that LLMs are specifically designed to steer away from humility and towards aggrandizement, convincing regular people that they've solved fundamental problems in physics. It gives everyone access to cult followers in their pocket, if they're so inclined.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you just trying to be a bit more measured by saying he wasn't so much "opposing" as "articulating pros and cons"?
Or are you trying to say that things like
"this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves"
or
"You would imagine that [written speeches] had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves."
aren't actual statements of opposition, or that there are no parallels to that and LLMs?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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!
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.
On a creative level, I remember McCarthy describing scalped heads as like wet polyps blue in the moonlight. I already switch off 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. If you can't beat 'em you can at least filter 'em out.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
Somehow made me think of Warhammer 40k (maybe pre men of iron?)
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.
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...
Scary... where can I find more of that?
Subtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!
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.
I was listening to one of Altman's more recent interviews and it sounded like he himself has LLM induced psychosis.
I'm not a fan of Altman, but it seems debatable whether LLM psychosis is psychosis if it is conducive to the subject given their environment. Which seems to be the case for Altman by some measures.
I'm sure if we took one of us back in time a couple hundred years we would be diagnosed with all sorts of machine-magic induced psychoses.
I get what you're saying, but psychosis is a very real thing that humans can fall into and I experienced it myself once.
Humility is the real cure, and there is a way that LLMs are specifically designed to steer away from humility and towards aggrandizement, convincing regular people that they've solved fundamental problems in physics. It gives everyone access to cult followers in their pocket, if they're so inclined.
I remember him tweeting about how he can "feel the AGI" when speaking to GPT
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.
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.
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
"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.
You have to make some mistakes in your communication (or anything) if you ever want to grow and learn.
You're absolutely right here and things have improved significantly at work after dropping this habit even if slightly.
https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/
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.
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.
Well, has it been an improvement?
No that's why I'm complaining
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.
As a bonus, mistakes can be blamed on AI.
For many that's not a bonus, that's the goal. Consequence-free life ahoy.
Fun and games until the AI decides extincting us is worth it.
The scary thing is that AI decision making has been infiltrating society for decades as an unseen entity.
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.
Yes exactly and I am actively applying for jobs. But I feel like the next job will also have this nonsense behaviour
Good luck finding a company that doesn't have these people if LLMs are used
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.
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
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...
It's not explanation — it's relabeling. Why it matters:
You're absolutely right
Great point — this is the smoking gun
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.
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!
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.
This could also be explained by the frequency illusion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
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.
Some play this everyday, as vocabulary will improve in time =3
https://play.freerice.com
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.
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.
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.
I would imagine a similar critique was leveled at the written word when it was starting to supplant oral cultures.
Well, Plato's sock puppet Socrates famously opposed writing with pretty much these arguments.
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.
Are you just trying to be a bit more measured by saying he wasn't so much "opposing" as "articulating pros and cons"?
Or are you trying to say that things like
"this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves"
or
"You would imagine that [written speeches] had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves."
aren't actual statements of opposition, or that there are no parallels to that and LLMs?
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.
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
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.
This is undoubtedly the case and imo quite concerning. Hard to minimize the effects as well, personally speaking.
Social media is a tool for perpetuating monothought
Social Media creates distinctive Filter Bubbles. A dominant LLM company (or multiple aligned ones) create one way of thinking.
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.
You are absolutely right!
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.
Knowing people have gone full "LLM-brain", it's not subtle.
Oh no, LLMs threaten our individuality ⸻ what will we do?!
Who is "us"?
…and the first paragraph has an em dash
> 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.
Compared to social media, probably for the better.
> 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!
Wasted the opportunity of using an em dash instead of an en dash in the title.