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Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

The article focuses on linguistic theories that regard natural language in a somewhat narrow sense: language as a cognitive phenomenon, language as a symbolic system, language as something that can be modeled and imitated by a computer. While those aspects are important, language is also a social phenomenon, something used for interaction among people for many different purposes.

Both traditional approaches to natural language—the cognitive and the social—face a challenge, because language is no longer used only for communication between human beings. What does it mean for linguistics now that human beings are increasingly using natural language to interact with computers? I don’t know the answer, but it’s a question that deserves attention.

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> What does it mean for linguistics now that human beings are increasingly using natural language to interact with computers?

Yeah, it's going to be strange. So much of our etiquette and norms and basic cultural assumption have to do with this idea:

This communication protocol of "language" is for humans. If something else is "on the wire" with us, it must be like us, and worthy of our attention or cycles. But this is increasingly going to be very untrue.

Culture is about to be weird.

Curious about what ChatGPT might have to say on this issue, I asked it:

https://www.gally.net/temp/20231116languageandai/index.html

Why do people keep asking models about models?

Well, in my case, I was struggling to come up with a coherent understanding for myself about how views of language might need to change when interaction with LLMs is taken into account. ChatGPT’s response helped me think about the issue more clearly. Others might not find the same clarity.

More probably (most) humans will realize that talking to computers is not very interesting or productive, and decide it is in fact not worthy of our attention or cycles. Much like a an extremely fancy phone menu system.

When language is regarded as a symbolic system, then what this means, is that it is a structure of relations of symbols emerging from social interactions. This is very fundamental to linguistics, as language is something precisely not ruled by some magical rules, but emerges from the social, that's how you can explain embedded power structures, change, etc. The connection between subject-subject and subject-object, and object-object is an active field of study. It is part of my PhD thesis, too.

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