[Much of this content is in Scientific American Magazine, Wikipedia and assorted articles in print]
If the reader has followed the news in recent months, that is, news about ChatGPT taking over the writing of documents heretofore written by Homos – everything from classroom homework to Congressional speeches and even government forms, the reader is aware that each ChatGPT manufacturer has its own dictionary, lexicon and Large Language Model (LLM). It turns out that one can identify a given LLM by how it connects its words, e.g., depending on its native language, age, gender, education and other factors. That individual speaking style is called an “idiolect.” It is similar in concept to, but much narrower than a dialect, which is the variety of a language spoken by a community.
There are several firms producing ChatGPT, e.g., Gemini and Copilot. Already established are uses to analyze police interviews with suspects, attribute authorship of documents and text messages, trace the linguistic backgrounds of asylum seekers and detect plagiarism, among other activities. Needless to say, elementary education is giving up teaching handwriting and higher grades yield to the jungle of student uses for ChatGPT creativity.
But mariner and Guru have another concern: will one’s social status depend on which idiolect they use? If wealthy people use one manufacturer’s idiolect and laborers use another idiolect, won’t that have the same effect on society as WOKE did for MAGA? The ultimate danger, however, is antitrust mergers and there turns out to be only one idiolect – one less intellectual liberty for homos.
Where is Neo when you need him?
Ancient Mariner
This is really scary and getting scarier. I had no idea that there were many ChatGPTs and that they “spoke” their own dialects. I predict that this will not end well. (Sound like anyone you know?)
Hmmm . . . Can’t think of anyone. What users have to do to identify the preferred idiolect is ask Google what is the average user income for each specific idiolect. It’s no different than checking out who uses various social network platforms.
Hey! How about Walter Winchell?
This is about the worst idea I have heard in a long list of bad ideas. I cannot imagine what kind of children will result. Or, YIKES, I can.