My kid sounds like ChatGPT, and soon yours might, too

It feels like I can’t read a comment thread, Reddit post, etc. anymore without someone accusing someone else of posting ChatGPT content. The accusations are almost always baseless in my limited experience.

Reading this, I can’t help but wonder if the author is just one of those people interacting with the real world.

I think there is a more obvious influence on “formal” communication: Google’s smart compose and smart reply.

Students writing papers now increasingly use Google Docs as Google pushes into the education space, and Google workspace has 9 million paying orgs. It seems possible that being consistently exposed to the same models/suggestions in school and then work (the main “formal” contexts for most) could have a drastic impact on professional communication.

I’d be interested to see someone study an organization’s language before and after adopting Google’s products to see what, if any, influence it has.

Why were there no examples in this post? Just vague references. Pretty unconvincing, especially since the son is 14 years old, an age of massive change.

I’m not doubting that ChatGPT, like many technologies before it, will change language, but this post leaves too much to the imagination.

I used to send emails like I was writing 5-paragraph essays... because schooling required me to write 5-paragraph essays.

Not useful for business emails that have to be concise to stand any hope of being read and understood.

It took years to rewire myself.

Reaffirms my determination to avoid all those cute custom, AI-generated stories services for my little kid, and to be very careful about other superficially child-safe media. He’s at a point where he’s latching on to phrases and repeating them, even weeks later.

I was thinking about this the other day what the long term etymological implications of LLMs will be. The wording, grammar, slang etc. Will be forever melded from now on with the meat and digital. In linguistic history this may be seen as profound a change as writing, the printing press and internet.

Lucky him.

The rest of us get a 13 year old that sounds like TikTok and a 6 year old that sounds like Fortnite.

This article sounds like ChatGPT: inoffensive, handwavy assertions drawn together from no particular sources with a mildly supercilious air.

Kids pick up new language patterns and use them all the time. I have a young friend whom I can always tell has been hanging around with someone new, or has become a fan of someone new, because of all the new lingo and colloquialisms that suddenly spews forth.

And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Face it, in a sense ChatGPT is us all. At least it is some reduced average of human rambling in cyberspace.

Speaking of faces in spaces, is there an equivalent to Eigenfaces in linguistics?

I suggest Eigenbabbles.

Yes, this post is self-referential.

Writing tools do influence expression. I recall Jerry Pournelle saying how using an early mobile computer with its 40 character screen width had made his sentences shorter. Others I have worked with have mentioned how Microsoft Word’s built in thesaurus not only influenced their word choice, but that that choice dated the writing to a specific version of Word.

Conspicuous absence of evidence or even specifics of what the author thinks “sounding like ChatGPT”. I personally wouldn’t characterise it as “robotic” or akin to a trope-y robotic character (Jane from the Good Place).

But credulously taking claims at face value, structure and clarity is a good thing for a teenager’s expository writing.

I've noticed this in myself since long before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altmans eye. It was more about reading/writing more frequently than listening/talking.

ChatGPT formality as another flavor for code switching. I could see it. Good or bad? I think it's good if they're testing how to be persuasive and if it works.

Curious how this came to pass. Does author think kid is using ChatGPT to help walk through situations?

Noam Chomsky famously discovered that the building blocks of language are preloaded into the human mind, children use a hypothetical tool called the Language Acquisition Device to quickly learn grammar even with little input. I wonder is this a genetic device or something of a quantum nature?

I hope context window is not limited by 32k

ChatGPT is the next TikTok, in that it will widely influence what the next generation thinks and does. Just wait until advertisers, ideologues, and governments sink their teeth into it to manipulate it, and your kids, for their benefit.

I believe that in a decade many kids will have exchanged more phrases with LLMs than with their parents.

Sorry, not buying this. He has ZERO examples in your post. But hey, it’s one good way of getting traffic from YC!