To be honest, this development is simply the logical consequence of applying the principle of profit maximization.
Unfortunately, technology has now reached such a scale that the people behind the spreadsheets are willing to sacrifice humanity itself.
That, too, is not surprising, because they will only realize their mistake when it is already too late.
Another example of the same principle is climate change.
I’m currently studying and gathering studies about language and cognition to see if LLMs could do anything to our culture. So far I’d lean to say that, yes, they could curate our words and thus alter the way we speak, write and think. Words are linked to our perception of reality somehow and given enough time our overlords could curate words they like, shadowban others and in that way interact with what we can communicate and think about.
Obviously there is a large group of people rejecting AI so they wouldn’t suffer from this.
That sounds very interesting - please keep us posted.
I think it’s very important to examine the effects of LLMs on society, how they influence discourse, their impact on the formation of public opinion, and the question of whether - and if so, to what extent - they shift the interpretation of words and narratives toward the few corporations that offer cloud models, and so on.
This is a broad field, but one that strikes me as quite important from a wide variety of perspectives.
It’s good to hear that there are people here who are looking into this from a scientific standpoint. I’d be very happy if you could update us on the state of research from time to time.
The more perspectives there are on this topic, the better.
To clarify one important thing though: I am not a scientist or an expert in the area. I’m a translator by trade, and since I couldn’t find anything related to this, I decided to try and write my own paper. I learned how to do it when I was still a student but it’s a while back and I don’t have the resources or institutional backup to carry on my own experiments. I’m simply trying to find evidence and synthetize it. My hope is 1) that it interests people and get them to think about it and 2) maybe in those people I got thinking, there will be actual researchers with the means to do that properly.
It doesn’t matter that you’re not a scientist. Your approach is still interesting - and yes: maybe it will inspire people or even spur research on these topics. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!