logoalt Hacker News

runarbergyesterday at 4:34 PM1 replyview on HN

I think such influence will be extremely minimal, like confined to dozens of new nouns and verbs, but no real change in grammar, etc.

Interactions between humans and computers in natural language for your average person is much much less then the interactions between that same person and their dog. Humans also speak in natural language to their dogs, they simplify their speech, use extreme intonation and emphasis, in a way we never do with each other. Yet, despite having been with dogs for 10,000+ years, it has not significantly affected our language (other then giving us new words).

EDIT: just found out HN annoyingly transforms U+202F (NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE), the ISO 80000-1 preferred way to type thousand separator


Replies

Nevermarkyesterday at 10:17 PM

> I think such influence will be extremely minimal.

AI will accelerate “natural” change in language like anything else.

And as AI changes our environment (mentally, socially, and inevitably physically) we will change and change our language.

But what will be interesting is the rise of agent to agent communication via human languages. As that kind of communication shows up in training sets, there will be a powerful eigenvector of change we can’t predict. Other than that it’s the path of efficient communication for them, and we are likely to pick up on those changes as from any other source of change.