I took both pills and washed em down with a glass of whiskey. What?

What

We've barely begun to see the shift. Crazy times.

I can't be the only one who just sees people giving up their freedom of thought to these things. Like especially software devs. I feel like I'm going crazy. People who were previously free thinkers that now talk to LLMs all the time and let their ideas supplant their own just seem like they've willingly plugged themselves back into the Matrix. I know because I could feel the pull, and now I recognize and resist it. But I feel like most other people are completely hoodwinked.

You're not the only one who's noticing it. Mannerisms and speech patterns are changing along with typical topics of discussion. What's scary to me is that the definitions of words are changing, taking on different connotations or obscure field specific meanings, at a rapid rate, and the technology is driving it further to become the "normal"

It's like it's homogenizing the collective unconscious of everyone that uses it. And behind all the affirmations and praise, it's actually the people getting manipulated and controlled rather than empowered.

i personally think this was the goal.

I remember all the hype before the virality, of people being excited for the collective knowledge of all of mankind... now they're gazing into the abyss.

I'm practically certain it is

I want to melt like this emoji 🫠

Think you might appreciate this video on how homogenizing is necessarily a consequence of what happens when translate or bring ideas to broader audiences. That it just what language does, and AI is an accelerant of that. One example is how English, becoming ever more dominant in usage around the world smooths out the specifics other languages can bring in, and therefore all the representations through what is expressible within the medium of the English language itself... to then what is even possible to represent within our minds. He has a ton of videos crossing this same road at different angles, and concludes that this is inescapable. And while that may be true, I have a few resolutions. One is to ingest as widely varied and spiky experiences you can and attempt to produce just as widely varied and spiky things, even if they are illegible to others.

My beef is the accelerant part... and the niche-specific part. A small subset of the herd is unintentionally redefining the language of the masses and its not necessarily homogemizing because of shared experience. The rapidity is the most concerning to me. We've seen how transportation efficiencies have eroded health and community. We've seen how food production efficiencies create imbalances between us and our habitats. We've seen how communication efficiencies reduce actionable virtue. But even in all this, my concern only stretches as far as it does due to those communication efficiencies. Resistance to these newly elevated and very narrow meanings is common enough that I keep having variations of this same conversation, with an increasing number of people who are opting out of whatever the hell is happening. It's only inevitable insofar as a measureable portion of society allows it to be. In that sense, we'll end up with a digital dialect and a tangible one that only overlaps out of necessity, I guess, as things have always been.

oh man. Touching on too many topics to respond to. Efficiency & surplus, how homogenizing is always done on the terms of what homogenizes are other videos in that same series! At too many levels to name, the habits and tendencies are carved from our previous experiences. Literally any action creates that groove, and ot gets smoother as you repeat. This is where I move into the not-so-metaphor of avalanches and cascades. Any advancement or efficiency is repetitive tacking on of some weight over time. It's not really quantifiable because we'd be able to anticipate the consequences ahead of time. The concerns of LLMs are not so different from the concerns against the offloading of our memory to books. The concern was real (as much as others would like to dismiss), but the specific manifestation could only be hinted at. With each advancement of what we call language technology, we've stacked on a new weight at a slightly different angle, and we're now approaching the critical point before a cascade, but the cascade will happen one way or another because avoiding them at one magnitude inevitably still builds up into a larger one over time. The two manifestations in this case, at varing combined levels, are to become hyper-local insulated communities and/or becoming part of the homegenized herd. This reply is long enough so ill conclude. The cascades are actually a sign of life and evolution, because they fundamentally reconfigure the system. Any pattern by definition is some rigidity, and I'm not pointing toward optimism or hopeless resign, but to synthesize an understanding to point at potential ways forward. My resolutions are not the same others will come up with, and that's the point. Because the varing solutions every individual and community creates is what keeps the system robust.

I don't want to watch more videos but I'd be curious to hear your full synapses around all that at some point.