The word meme appears in the paper, but only once (except for keywords and references).

I'm wondering why that is. Maybe they avoided using it because most people think it means something else. (I've certainly had a hard time talking about them, for this reason!)

> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus!

You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing.

The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.

>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in."

You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.

I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.

> the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable

Nah, sometimes you should just come out say it. Those who get offended need to hear it more than anyone else.

Speaking of memetics and favorite books, check out There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm who also wrote some seminal short stories including the one that inspired the Alex Garland show Devs. The book is about how to deal with beings that make you forget you ever saw then, a sort of opposite mind virus.

your friend would be a possible infection point (not a virus) for the memes encoded in the book. As a form of memetic transmission a book, if read all the way through, is especially potent - take Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged as an example. Books are many memes assembled together into a stable culture that reinforces the memes. The virtues of selfishness as a meme would be weak and probably die pretty quickly without all the support the book offers.

Friends probably are not wide spreading infection points, the way reviews in professional journals are or the idea that successful people have recommended things, but they are especially successful at making the transmitted meme stick, as you will keep getting reinfected from them over time. Unless you break up that dangerous friendship!!

Our enlightened ideas and their dangerously agitating propaganda (literally a virus).

The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.

Agree I was immediately mentally substituting "the telephone" and "printed books" for "LLM" and both fit quite well

Wasn't aware that memes were an accepted part of evolutionary biology. They're not inherited like genes through reproduction that are subject to natural selection via biological fitness. Or any other evolutionary mechanism.

The prevalence of LLM-generated text masquerading as otherwise and incorporated into a significant fraction of all published text distinguishes this info-organism from all others.

Memes are what we are talking about.

Yeah I mean if everything is virus that word seems to hold no meaning =) So thats the reality behind language itself. Communication itself really starts to mean everything and nothing simultaneously, at least as a deeper philosophical truth. You can start to poke holes in jsut about everything this way.