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   jonny (good kind) (jonny@neuromatch.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:27:42 JST jonny (good kind)

   thinking about LLMs in the long term, the language evolutionary long term, where until now language evolved alongside people, words shifting meaning and being created or lost because of changes in culture. But now as more and more of language by volume is overwhelmed by LLM slop, the near-semantic misses like "Crouched Fingers" will accumulate and make new norms.

   https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113525654645929633

   That's not to say that there is such a thing as "wrong" language per se, nor to say that LLMs interact with language in any way that resembles the way humans do - sort of the opposite, that language itself will shift on a new set of axes and constraints that are wholly indifferent to human usage of language except as filtered through their profitability by their owners and secondhand through increasingly mixed human/llm training data. capital already does and has always imposed some forcing direction on language, being uh a salient fact of our culture - advertising is obvi a pretty big deal. i don't have words to say why it just seems different to have language across domains just completely swamped by tech companies.

   • Embed this notice
     Fifi Lamoura (fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:48:57 JST Fifi Lamoura

     in reply to

     @jonny Also, Georgian guy behind Skibidi toilets is more like a 4Chan kind of dude but just with cheap videos that are racist and pro-Russian war on Ukraine. It's more pro-Russia White supremacist meme-ing. The point of this kind of shit is to seduce boys with absurd/funny stuff while also promoting racism (and Russia).
     Also, right wingers seem to understand the power of language to shape and manipulate our consensus reality a lot better than Liberals and even a lot of contemporary leftists seem to do. Language can be weaponized. It shapes how we think and feel. Words really do matter, as Orwell tried to make clear.

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     jonny (good kind) (jonny@neuromatch.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:48:59 JST jonny (good kind)

     in reply to

     • Fifi Lamoura

     @fifilamoura
     That is very interesting and I did not know thay and I will check out this stuff in the morning.

     (In case I wasn't clear I wasn't saying skibidi was invented by an LLM, I was saying that word usage is stratefied by technology usage in part already, e.g. a pair of gen z ppl I used to live with were like well aware and fluent or not in the set of words ppl stereotype as "gen z slang" depending on if they used tiktok, or ive known parents who picked it up from their kids playing roblox, and that usage/nonusage of LLMs could be another maybe more substantial language fissure)

   • Embed this notice
     Fifi Lamoura (fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:48:59 JST Fifi Lamoura

     in reply to

     @jonny Not to harsh your buzz but what you're describing sounds like how slang has functioned and travelled through culture for at least the last 100 years (in a Modern context, slang and in-group patois and slang obviously go back further). See also Lavender Languages, Black American slang, teenagers since we created the category of teenager, etc. Often these innovations in language reach the mainstream (aka dominant and dominating culture) through music, just as other aesthetic innovations usually first reach the mainstream via visual art, fashion and music.

     bhaugen repeated this.
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     Fifi Lamoura (fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:49:00 JST Fifi Lamoura

     in reply to

     @jonny Skibidi is a nonsense word from Russian techno outfit Little Big's song of the same name. It was made up by people not an LLM. Little Big was huge in Russia but left Russia when Putin launched its invasion of Ukraine. The Skibidi toilets thing is a very bad imitation of Little Bigs absurdist Russian aesthetic and may well be a form of war propaganda (one of Russia's more influential propagandists was an artist, crude absurdity is a tactic). Little Big were massive in Russia and the song Skibidi got a fair amount of attention in some circles in the West (their videos are really fun and they really established a certain absurdist aesthetic). Anyway, main point is it's nonsense slang made up by human artists who are famous for an absurd and surrealist aesthetic and not an invention of an LLM. This ends our Ted Talk on the etymology of Skibidi and why it's not indicative of LLMs creating a new language. It's all human inventiveness and about how words sound in a musical context, it's jazz scatting and very human creativity.

     https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trust-the-tale-not-the-teller-art-and-propaganda-in-contemporary-russia/

     https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mDFBTdToRmw

   • Embed this notice
     jonny (good kind) (jonny@neuromatch.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:49:01 JST jonny (good kind)

     in reply to

     like for now we're still dealing with the fact that it's just a bunch of word salad all over the place and the information it contains is broken, but does it also look like language itself getting randomly walked around until some parts of it are "not ours" but still recognizable as a distinct accent, dialect, or language?

     e.g. some generational language differences like skibidi et al slang are partially technological differences already, will we be able to "hear a slight LLM accent" in people that have heavy exposure to them?