AI and the Future of Human Language (Spoiler: It’s Weird)

What is the future of human language when we start creating it with machines? We’re already doing it.

Photo by Ling App on Unsplash

Google translate thinks Putin runs Mordor and ChatGPT invented a guy named “Pernjamin”, who doesn’t exist but sounds like an old childhood friend. And your phone thinks you want to “duck” someone. They’re funny. And true. This did happen with Google translate, ChatGPT and iPhones with the “ducking” thing.

Yet some of these weird language plays aren’t just digital bloopers. In some ways, they’re actually rewiring the human language. Tiny linguistic mutations that become part of how we talk. These machines weren’t designed to do this, they were designed to help us perfect our language. Instead, they are becoming co-conspirators in the evolution of our languages, turning errors into cultural elements and bugs into features.

This is quite interesting and fascinating and yet another signal of how we’re evolving our relationships with and to machines. Especially via LLMs (Large Language Models like ChatGPT or Claude.) And the results may have some profound impacts on the future of our language. In a way, we are assigning some of our human agency over to machines.