AI may be making us think and write more alike

misterflibble

Subtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!

downboots

It's not explanation — it's relabeling. Why it matters:

oceansky

Wasted the opportunity of using an em dash instead of an en dash in the title.

adriand

I always wonder if competitive market dynamics will solve problems like these, at least to some extent and for some people, because the people who retain the ability to communicate in a distinctive, persuasive and original style will be rewarded. Corporate dronespeak is no less homogeneous than AI writing, and companies with this communication style are regularly disrupted by nimbler, more authentic-sounding competitors.

rdevilla

This state of affairs presages the advent of a second dark age - one that will forever eclipse the era of radical openness & transparency that once served the software community for decades. Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM whok would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale, until any possible information asymmetries have been arbitraged away. The development & secrecy of technique will once again become a deep moat as LLMs fall into local, suboptimal minima, trained on and marketed towards the lowest common denominator. The Internet, or at least, The Web, becomes a Dark Forest of the Dead Internet (Theory), in which humans fear of speaking out and capturing the attention of the LLM who would siphon their creative essence for more, ever more training data. Interaction contracts into small meshes of trusted, verifiably human participants to keep the tides of spamslop at bay. Quasi-monastic orders that still scribe with pen and paper emerge, that believe there is still value in training and educating a human mind and body. - Unknown, 19 Feb 2026

anizan

Social media is a tool for perpetuating monothought

paganel

> contributed to the research, which was supported by funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. I guess when they're not busying bombing train infrastructure in Iran they have some money left to give to some propagandizing about AI. Always try to stay on top of the game!

tom-blk

This is undoubtedly the case and imo quite concerning. Hard to minimize the effects as well, personally speaking.

api

Compared to social media, probably for the better.

dist-epoch

> The team points to multiple studies showing that LLM outputs are less varied than human-generated writing and that LLM outputs tend to reflect the language, values and reasoning styles of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. ... The researchers say that AI developers should intentionally incorporate diversity in language, perspectives and reasoning into their models. Which is why Altman says Saudi Arabia should have it's own Sovereign AI cloud. Why should LLMs reflect democratic societies views on man and woman for example? They should also reflect the perspectives on man and woman that Saudi Arabia has, especially to local people. Western views should not be imposed on the rest of the world.

uncanny2

I have made an observation that others have not discussed, that the real gem of our collective LLM experience is the proper documentation of “skills.” Am I the only one who has noticed that the proper documentation of skills we do for LLMs after so many decades of neglecting junior and mid level roles are the real work? We carefully explain to our LLMs policies, procedures, and practices which for generations before we have vaguely arbitrarily and ambiguously expected each human role to “figure out” for themselves? Simply as a catalog of expectations our experiences have been valuable, apart from the “automated” aspects the LLms provide.

stared

You are absolutely right!

Brendinooo

I would imagine a similar critique was leveled at the written word when it was starting to supplant oral cultures.

jessep

Yeah, I’ve notice that people have started to sound like LLMs even when the LLMs aren’t writing for them. Not stupid people. Not lazy people. Some of the smartest people I know —- I can’t figure out how to use an em dash here, but you get the point.

stabbles

Oh no, LLMs threaten our individuality ⸻ what will we do?!

compounding_it

People are unloading the cognitive load onto the LLM. Probably because life stress is causing them to rely on technology to bring relief. It may not necessarily be a great choice.

everdrive

So too did the printing press. Again, this is not a "something similar has happened in the past, therefore this is nothing new" sort of comment. This is quite new, however this outcome was totally unavoidable -- once methods of communication become widespread and centralized it is impossible for them not to impact language and thought.

robofanatic

Well, in few years not sure I will know how to think any more. If I am stuck on something I just ask the LLM and get the solution. While this shortcut sometimes saves me a ton of time and headaches, I miss that long route of thinking and getting to a solution myself. Maybe in future we will have gyms for brain workouts… I don’t know

ori_b

Knowing people have gone full "LLM-brain", it's not subtle.

sobiolite

Human communication and reasoning is the end result of billions of years of evolution. I'd be very surprised if LLMs can fundamentally alter it in a few years. When considering phenomenon like these, I think people seriously underestimate what I'd call the "fashion effect". When a new technology, medium or aesthetic appears, it can have a surprisingly rapid influence on behaviour and discourse. The human social brain seems especially susceptible to novelty in this way. Because the effects appear so fast and are often so striking, even disturbing, due to their unfamiliarity, it is tempting to imagine that they represent a fundamental transformation and break from the existing technological, social and moral order. And we extrapolate that their rapid growth will continue unchecked in its speed and intensity, eventually crowding out everything that came before it. But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity. LLMs will certainly have an effect on how humans reason and communicate, but the idea that they will so effortlessly reshape it is, in my opinion, rather naive. The comments in this thread alone prove that LLM-speak is already a well-recognised dialect replete with clichés that most people will learn to avoid for fear of looking bad.