The ubiquity of audio commutation technologies, particularly telephone, radio, and TV, have had a significant affect on language. They further spread English around the world making it more accessible and more necessary for lower social and economic classes, they led to the blending of dialects and the death of some smaller regional dialects. They enabled the rapid adoption of new words and concepts.
How will LLMs affect language? Will they further cement English as the world’s dominant language or lead to the adoption of a new lingua franca? Will they be able to adapt to differences in dialects or will they force us to further consolidate how we speak? What about programming languages? Will the model best able to generate usable code determine what language or languages will be used in the future? Thoughts and beliefs generally follow language, at least on the social scale, how will LLM’s affects on language affect how we think and act? What we believe?
I will share a journal entry from when I was mulling this over last December. Interested in your thoughts:
In old media, such as books and movies, we passively receive the media. We hear stories of heroes, songs about how the singer feels, written thoughts from inside another writer’s mind. These are valuable because of how we connect with others and thereby grow.
Interactive media, e.g. video games, allow us to tinker with a story and interrogate our relationship and attitude towards the ideas and themes thereby. We pull a lever, and the story changes direction. Video games have become such a large industry thanks to the more profound personal connection we can develop with the art through prescribed mechanical interactions. We press the buttons, and become the hero.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, it won’t be long before someone invents a new form of storytelling predicated on this technology. While we used to read stories, it now becomes possible for stories to be read into us. An AI can now be created that observes your life, and makes sense of it in a profound larger context.
This new media would be an AI companion who acts as a fourth wall of your life; layering your struggles and triumphs within a larger context, lightly editorializing, adding soundtracks that seamlessly portray your energy and emotional state (or humorously juxtapose it), adding humorous asides or callbacks that keep you in the moment, gently reminding and prompting next activities, reflecting on failures or calling attention to bad habits one is trying to break, and generally contriving to elevate the daily experience to the level of storytelling. It would give life an enhanced sense of meaningful examination, refining our sense of self and bringing our life into focus. This is a form of media that is not itself passively received, but actively treats your life as a fully interactive lived experience.
Art is integral to our ability to relate to others, experience things that are larger than ourselves, and to create meaning. This “fourth wall” AI would be a new form of media that seeks to amplify our understanding of ourselves, integrating our egos with our life as it exists as we change and grow throughout life.
The risks posed by malfeasant propagation of such a medium are at once beyond imagining and entirely predictable; the manufacturing of consent, the corrupting influence of profit motives, and the use of media as a social control mechanism are all pre-21st century concepts in media.
Whether a “fourth wall AI” represents a new threat or merely a quantum leap in the scale of preexisting threats cannot be known in advance. All of the above is to merely assert that we will see, and that such a medium could theoretically be used as art in the true sense, if such technology can be put in the hands of artists, and not just corporations.