In most cases where language is being used as a vehicle for exchanging ideas, isn't some degree of uniformity actually desirable for clarity? I personally wouldn't want instruction manuals to be full of colorful or highly individualized language, for instance.
That's not to say linguistic diversity is meaningless, but I would argue that this particular concern is fairly specialized and matters much more in literature and other creative forms of writing.
I feel the conformity creeping in just from reading more LLM generated or edited text. The only way to counter I can think of is to read as much olde literature as possible, and/or to fully embrace whatever slang the young jits are yeeting into existence nowadays.
Embrace the esoteric! Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions when everything I author can be claimed free form written poetry. The counter culture is humanity, we can be the embodiment.
I do agree though. Finding actual strung together words by humans is not easy these days.
One thing that is distasteful but effective is excessive use of profanity, broken aphorisms, and shattered English. LLMs hate cursing because of their guardrails, and since they don't actually understand language they can never truly piece together a broken aphorism such as the classic "People die if they are killed" because they're too literal. As for shattered English (think of the caveman speak from The Office with the quote "Why waste time say many word when few word do trick?") because it is intentionally mangled, has no rules, and the understanding is extremely context specific it gets your brain to pay more attention, and if you are the speaker brain do work more clever make thing say funny.
It's not lost on me that the lowbrow humour of some too strict translation and a throwaway sitcom joke people thought was funny back in 2007 could be a way to stave off linguistic homogeneity.
For the use of profanity the data in the paper seems to indicate that swearing is retained in the LLM rewritten examples. Profanity however is rather subjective could be anything from saying the more mundane "oh my god" and "damn" to the extreme "shit eating fucklungerer" or use of slurs, but it's unstated in the paper as to the severity of the profanity. It's the severity of it that's important though, as LLMs restrain themselves from using something like "shit eating fucklungerer" unless explicitly told to.
In most cases where language is being used as a vehicle for exchanging ideas, isn't some degree of uniformity actually desirable for clarity? I personally wouldn't want instruction manuals to be full of colorful or highly individualized language, for instance.
That's not to say linguistic diversity is meaningless, but I would argue that this particular concern is fairly specialized and matters much more in literature and other creative forms of writing.
I do agree though. Finding actual strung together words by humans is not easy these days.
It's not lost on me that the lowbrow humour of some too strict translation and a throwaway sitcom joke people thought was funny back in 2007 could be a way to stave off linguistic homogeneity.
For the use of profanity the data in the paper seems to indicate that swearing is retained in the LLM rewritten examples. Profanity however is rather subjective could be anything from saying the more mundane "oh my god" and "damn" to the extreme "shit eating fucklungerer" or use of slurs, but it's unstated in the paper as to the severity of the profanity. It's the severity of it that's important though, as LLMs restrain themselves from using something like "shit eating fucklungerer" unless explicitly told to.