Tag: language

  • Google’s AI pitch is a recipe for email hell – The Verge

    And even worse, the AI generation reinforces the idea that overenthusiastic US business speak is the _required_ way to write, regardless of whether it’s a necessary skill for the job. I’ve seen thoughtful stories about people with dyslexia using ChatGPT to produce text that is — as a Washington Post article puts it — “unfailingly professional and polite.” But there’s an unspoken, simpler alternative: being willing to accept wider variations in how people communicate. I don’t begrudge anyone who uses AI writing to meet largely arbitrary standards, but at a society-wide level, it’s a linguistic arms race toward a more boring future.

  • You are not a parrot. And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.Intelligencer
    Please do not conflate word form and meaning. Mind your own credulity. These are Bender’s rallying cries. The octopus paper is a fable for our time. The big question underlying it is not about tech. It’s about us. How are we going to handle ourselves around these machines? […]

    A handful of companies control what PricewaterhouseCoopers called a “$15.7 trillion game changer of an industry.” Those companies employ or finance the work of a huge chunk of the academics who understand how to make LLMs. This leaves few people with the expertise and authority to say, “Wait, why are these companies blurring the distinction between what is human and what’s a language model? Is this what we want?”

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