The mere existence of LLMs generating text now means all text must be evaluated in its shadow, whether we use it - or hate it - or not. Already online threads are full of accusations of others being LLMs - the m-dash being an early casualty of typography, commonly understood as a tell. the verge finds studies confirming people are responding to how llms have entered language, while others anticipate we will engage in an arms race of avoiding LLM likeness as they learn the same techniques.
Like PFASs, they’re out and impossible to remove, endemically affecting how we think and express ourselves, making us degrade language to seem real while learning those same degradation to better mimic us in future. We have gone from the establishing an anthropocene in the fossil record to establishing a computatiocene in our cultural record. Our very though, increasingly intertwined with algorithmic outputs, the microplastics of language (via)