alt Hacker NewsHuman communication and reasoning is the end result of billions of years of evolution. I'd be very surprised if LLMs can fundamentally alter it in a few years.
When considering phenomenon like these, I think people seriously underestimate what I'd call the "fashion effect". When a new technology, medium or aesthetic appears, it can have a surprisingly rapid influence on behaviour and discourse. The human social brain seems especially susceptible to novelty in this way.
Because the effects appear so fast and are often so striking, even disturbing, due to their unfamiliarity, it is tempting to imagine that they represent a fundamental transformation and break from the existing technological, social and moral order. And we extrapolate that their rapid growth will continue unchecked in its speed and intensity, eventually crowding out everything that came before it.
But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity.
LLMs will certainly have an effect on how humans reason and communicate, but the idea that they will so effortlessly reshape it is, in my opinion, rather naive. The comments in this thread alone prove that LLM-speak is already a well-recognised dialect replete with clichés that most people will learn to avoid for fear of looking bad.
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I caught myself saying “you’re absolutely right” to my wife last night, unironically. This was 100% not in my vocabulary six months ago.
If I spend 40 hours a week talking to anybody, some of their language or mannerisms are going to rub off on me. I can’t think of a compelling reason why a human-sounding chat bot would be any different.
It's obviously untrue that technology can't fundamentally alter human communication in a few years. For example, the advent of film, then radio, and finally television caused a convergence of culture at the national and even global level. Characters like Mickey Mouse and the cast of Star Trek are instantly recognized internationally, even to those who never have seen any of the works they star in. There likely isn't anyone here who doesn't remember some catchy commercial jingle of their youth or catchphrase from media that entered the national lexicon. And yes, it also affected reasoning: Walter Cronkite, a long ago TV journalist, was labelled "the most trusted man in America" for the integrity of his reporting. The internet caused a second wave of transformation since it was many-to-many communication instead of unidirectional broadcasting that allowed the coalescence of subcultures, examples being various fandoms and, infamously, 4chan.
Young singers brought up listening to autotuned vocals can unknowingly learn and emulate the sonic signature of the tuning algorithm (and the telltale lilt when it's used as an effect, but the subtle tuning case is more surprising).
If you read too much sloppy LLM prose, it's going to influence how you write and structure your own.
Social media has shaped us. Why should AI not do the same?
It may finally [help us fix out the bullshit asymmetry](https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2026/03/31/ai-the-bullshi...) that has been exacerbated by social media.
If AI can provide us with a shared source of truth, it will be a big improvement over whatever twitter is doing to people.
And strangely, all these models seem to converge to a shared epistemology.
There is a reason Coke spends ~ 5 billion dollars worldwide on advertising sugar water... It works.
Monkey see monkey do. Simple as that.
Technologies often have rapid, and obvious, effects on writing. The telegraph services charged by the word, so an abbreviated style that became known as "telegraphese", developed.
And it doesn't have to be that direct. Novels have been hugely influenced by films.
Fashion seems like the right analogy. I think about how many sentences I speak today that would have been incompressible to me ~15 years ago and not even due to recent events/technology, but just because our slang/humor has evolved during that time.
The flip side is the same thing was true then, and we aren't making a lot of jokes about the narwhal baconing at midnight these days.
The first thing I thought when I read the abstract of the underlying paper was that this sounds like "model collapse" at the society level.
I don't feel super confident that we'll "soon" find ourselves in a world where there is no variance left in thought (would that be the net effect of total model/epistemic collapse?), though if you do accept that there could be any loss of variance due to AI, perhaps it's not unreasonable to consider how much and how quickly could this happen?
All this is by way of saying, I don't think it's wrong to ask these kinds of questions and think deeply about the consequences of societal shifts like this.
Think of all the things that took hundreds/thousands/millions of years to develop and mature, which humans have managed to destroy in relatively short order.
Every 50 years we cycle out an entirely new batch of thinking humans. What cognitive legacy is it exactly that you think is going to be self-preserving?
>But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity
The internet didn't follow this trajectory. Neither did smart phones.
Surprise, surprise, it's the same people trying to make AI entrenched into our society.
Fads are often driven by moneyed interests. AI is no different. As long as guys Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. are trying to bend the world to their will, and as long as they have the resources to do so, AI will be zeitgeist for just as long. On a smaller scale, this extends even to a CEO outsourcing support to AI, etc.
There's plenty of people communicating more with LLMs than humans right now, of course it's going to have an effect because our language and thought patterns are extremely adaptive to our environment. The communication system we are born with is extremely bare-bones/general so that it can absorb whatever language and culture we are born into.