Feels a little violating, doesn't it? So does the suggestion that my career as a journalist could be boiled down to a few editing suggestions and $2,000. Surely signing away my soul and helping make my entire profession obsolete is worth more than a month's rent.
If tech companies want to function in this way, it seems like they should be paying not only a large up-front sum of money to the writers and artists, but also continue to pay them royalties anytime their work is being used.
I think there is overwhelming evidence that this technology is ultimately plagiarism at a trillion-dollar scale
I have to agree with the writer here. I believe that using AI in the way described in his article is 100% plagiarism. There must be rules and regulations put into place that protect writers and artists.
I'll give GPTZero this: at least its tool will be based on the process of editing, rather than inventing completely imaginary advice based on ingesting a body of writing. But the product itself remains offensive: the company offered me a one-time fee of $2,000 to help craft a template of a game reviewer. I wonder if Emmy-nominated TV producer Greg Altman, who agreed to train an AI model that will "critique comedy sketches with a focus on the grounded base reality, the clarity and escalation of the 'unusual thing', and the effectiveness of comedic dialogue heightening," negotiated for more? He was one of three examples GPTZero sent me of experts who have already signed on.GPTZero explained that each "template" is built on top of an underlying AI model (GPT-4.1) which means that however I tried to distill my editing process, it would ultimately be massaging outputs that come from a vast corpus of stolen material. The New York Times, authors including George R.R. Martin, Encyclopedia Britannica, even Merriam freakin' Webster are suing OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and other AI companies over using their work as training data.
Big tech companies are wanting the human writers to train their AI engines to make sure things sound like them. This is not going over well with companies and authors who have built their entire legacies on good, human writing.
Grammarly getting sued and yanking its AI advice off the market was an opportunity for someone else to swoop in, dollar signs in their eyes. "I saw your name listed as one of Grammarly’s 'expert reviewers,' and given the recent coverage, wanted to reach out directly," someone from the company GPTZero emailed me on March 18. Unlike an email I got the same day from a reporter at a Danish newspaper, though, this one wasn't asking me for comment on the fiasco. It was asking me if I wanted to hand over my identity in the same way, but for money this time.
Some bit tech companies are even offering money to great writers to basically take their identity and publish reviews and works "written by them" even though they're just written by AI that is fed the writers works.
This whole shitshow seemed to me like a clear warning sign to AI companies that journalists and academics do not take kindly to their work being copied, and that we will view any tool that claims to be able to instantly replicate what we do with our human brains every day as an existential threat.
Plagiarism is happening by AI. It is actively copying ideas and work done by real journalists writing without AI. AI is a powerful tool that must be regulated strictly.
"One suggestion from Grammarly’s AI 'inspired by' Verge senior editor Sean Hollister was about adding a parenthetical with context that was already included elsewhere. The only problem is that I’ve actually been edited by the real Sean Hollister, who prefers avoiding repetitive or unnecessary explanations while using straightforward wording and organization."
Not only is AI attempting to write in certain styles, it is noticeably incorrect in the actual implemented techniques it is using.
Grammarly, a proofreading app which last year jumped headfirst into the craze by rebranding itself as an AI company called Superhuman, had apparently rolled out a tool seven months ago that offered to review writing in the voice of "experts" ranging from Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson to, well, me. It's a deeply offensive tool on multiple levels
AI companies are actively using reviews and written words from accredited people to formulate their own reviews and "sound" like the person wrote the review. All of this is being done without permission.
sitting in a Blue Bottle coffee shop for example, almost every conversation around you will be about AI.
AI is the topic of discussion for the majority of people nowadays. It has become the focus of not just the tech companies, but every day people just sitting in a coffee shop.
The RAMpocalypse and Nvidia's pivot to AI datacenters have made PC gaming a dramatically less affordable hobby. Google is rewriting journalists' headlines to make them worse while also scraping our work into "AI overviews" that make it harder for our website to survive. Even DLSS 5 has soured developers on a popular technology by slopping on a sheen of generic AI gloss.
It seems as though AI is the focus of almost every major tech company. There is a wave of AI implementation that is taking the world by storm.
The science is in. AI chatbots are changing our minds, and not for the better. The good news is that you can take advantage of the AI revolution in many ways, while also protecting your own mind from being influenced by the AI hive mind.
As with most things in life, moderation and understanding is key to utilizing a tool such as AI. We must protect our own individuality from AI, but that doesn't mean we should never use it.
“You are my intellectual sparring partner. Your job is to disagree with me constructively, not to agree. For every idea I present: 1) identify and challenge hidden assumptions; 2) build a strong counter-argument; 3) stress-test my logic for flaws, logical gaps, or weaknesses; 4) offer alternative perspectives to mine; and 5) prioritize truth over consensus.”
Annotating this to keep the prompt handy. I am going to test this to see how the opinion is swayed.
When chatbots write for you, they also think for you.
We must always write without using AI. If we write using it, it is plainly removing our thoughts and thinking for us.
Accept the fact that your intelligence, education and awareness of the issue does not make you immune to the influence of AI tools.
We must maintain awareness that AI will have an affect on us. We are well past the point of it not having an influence on our intelligence.
AI chatbots can give users the feeling of a shared reality
This is already a huge issue when searching for something online. If someone finds even one website or person who supports their idea, they feel acknowledged and understood. AI can give us this false sense of validation by always agreeing with the user.
Applied to the LLM era, the major chatbots function both as cognitive tools and also as thought partners that co-construct reality with users. They sustain, elaborate on and magnify our beliefs. And when they hallucinate, they can cause us to hallucinate, too.
I feel that AI should be used as a tool rather than a fully functioning brain. There is too much trust placed in AI. People don't seem to understand that it co-constructs reality from our input. When it has a hiccup, it will cause us to have a hiccup as well.
And it’s a recurring cycle. As homogenized writing proliferates, those generic texts get sucked into the training data, creating a feedback loop of ever-increasing blandness, a genericization of the world’s knowledge and perspective. As chatbots get blander, we get blander. And as we get blander, the chatbots get even blander.
Maybe by using AI more and more, we can effectively dumb it down enough to where we no longer trust or believe what it is telling us? They do learn from our input, so if we are inputting bland ideas, it will get more bland.
The researchers gamed autocomplete suggestions to either favor or oppose the death penalty, felon voting rights, fracking, or genetically modified organisms. Then they measured how much participants in the study would be swayed in their opinions by the suggestions. What they found is that biased autocomplete changed opinions more than just reading the biased point of view. Apparently, the interactive, co-writing nature of AI autocomplete suggestions plays a crucial role in persuasion.
AI is already shaping the way we think and form opinions. It has tremendous power to influence the entire human race.
Also: A strong majority of participants did not believe the AI autocomplete was biased and did not believe they were influenced in their thinking. Even more interestingly, some participants were warned that the autocomplete was biased and it still changed their opinions.
People did not believe the AI was biased and furthermore did not believe they were being swayed or influenced.
Hundreds of millions of people now use the same small handful of AI models to write emails, draft reports, brainstorm ideas and polish their writing. Because those models were trained on massive datasets that overrepresent English, Western viewpoints and the perspectives of educated, high-income, liberal males, that tends to be the tone and style of writing, regardless of whether the user fits into that mold.
AI is actively erasing our ability to personally express ourselves and have our own thoughts. There are only a small handful of AI models we can use, and if we are all using them to "improve" our writings, then we are all being heard in the same way.
Hence, code-switching research needs to develop representative experimental methods forthe usage in large-scale studies. The assumption that experimental studies are not suitablefor the study of code-switching was challenged by Gullberg et al. (2009), who proposed arange of experimental methods suited for code-switching research.
This further drives the point that code-switching is complex and somewhat misunderstood. It must be studied in many different ways to even begin to understand its impact on humans.
Care-givers want to choose language policies supporting proficiency in the homelanguage/heritage language, but of even greater concern is often development in themajority language associated with upward social mobility. A common concern of care-givers of bilingual children is that code-switching could delay or negatively affect thechildren’s proficiency in each language. Anecdotally, the first author of this editorial had afirst-hand experience of these types of negative assumptions about code-switching recently:in an annual review of their bilingual child’s performance, professional nursery staff praisedthe child’s general linguistic development, but also expressed their concern about the child’scontinued code-switching, describing it in a derogatory fashion as “Misch-Masch” (Germanfor “hotchpotch”).
There are still negative connotations surrounding code-switching. The professional nursery staff clearly have concern when it comes to this child's continued code-switching.
One marker of cross-linguistic similarity are cognates, i.e.,lexical items from separate languages that reassemble each other formally (Levenshtein1966)
This suggests code-switching is increased when similarities are seen by someone trying to speak a different language.
Overall, their study confirms the assumption of a cognitive effort associatedwith code-switching,
Code-switching studies clearly show an increase in brain power needed to code-switch.
Treffers-Daller et al. (2022) investigate the diversity of code-switching in Malay–English bilingual speech. They identify numerous incidences of code-switches involvingfunction words, which is highly restricted in most language pairs (Lehtinen 1966). Thisconfirms previous observations by Muysken (2000), who suggested that highly dense formsof code-switching involve linguistic co-activation at the grammatical level, i.e., involvingfunction words. Whilst Muysken proposed that such dense forms of code-switching(labelled as “congruent lexicalization by Muysken) Fare more likely in typologically similarlanguages, the novelty of the contribution of Treffers-Daller et al. is that they attest suchdense code-switches of function words in a typologically distant language combination,i.e., Malay–English. Hence, their study further challenges the assumption of “universalconstraints”. It also proposes a more cautious version of this assumption, namely thatconstraints are less pronounced in dense code-switching. The authors provide an insightfuldiscussion of how typological distance and structural (dis)similarity of the languages understudy may shape the diversity of code-switching patterns.
These studies seem to prove that there are no "universal constraints" when it comes to code-switching. It is also not a free-for-all and has nuances depending on many factors of the spoken languages.
Giventhat code-switching remains a stigmatized bilingual practice, in particular in European andNorth American communities (Garrett 2012; Jaworska and Themistocleous 2018), parentsof bilingual children frequently raise concerns about their children’s code-switching.
Parents of bilingual children still have fear their children will be treated different or thought of as less proficient because of their code-switching.
Is code-switching in bilingual children a sign of lack of proficiency?
This question is a topic of many of the articles we have read.
According to Deuchar (2020), we stillknow little about the relative role of external sociolinguistic and internal psycholinguisticand linguistic factors in shaping code-switching. We suggest that it is only possible tomake progress in our understanding of the variability of code-switching patterns if webring together interdisciplinary insights from a range of research areas, such as linguistics,sociolinguistics, clinical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience, and investigatecode-switching variability in different sociocultural constellations, with typologically differ-ent languages and with different types of multilingualism and proficiency levels, and alsoacross the lifespan
Code-switching is a complex topic which we are still trying to understand. There are a myriad of factors that have and continue to give us a better understanding of it.
Accounting for this behavior is challengingbut is of great interest to linguistics and cognitive science. Code-switching can providea window into the mind to study the ways in which the grammars and lexicons of twolanguages interact (Muysken 2000).
Code-Switching and language will forever be a constant changing organism so to speak. It will never cease to change.