🔴 **Losing our voice? Fears AI tone-shifting tech could flatten communication**
Robert Booth
_Prof Rob Drummond, a sociolinguist at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “We are giving control of forming our identity to a machine. It is creating an extra layer of inauthenticity to this identity creation. I do wonder if longer term people are going to react against that.” He described automatic tone changing as “the ultimate superficiality”._
#Linguistics #Language #AI #ArtificialIntelligence @linguistics @ai
@bibliolater @linguistics @ai We have long been pushed this way in the name of "scholarly" tone, especially in the social sciences. The whole APA manual was developed expressly to purge scholarly writing of individual bias, and there's no shortage of reviewers and reviewers out there who demand crabbed verbiage on the grounds that it is "formal" and "academic". Or who forbid passive voice. How many of them are actually rhetors? They simply don't know – what they exercise is mere prejudice.
@libroraptor @linguistics @ai What would you advise by way of reforming the situation?
@bibliolater @linguistics @ai Styles have epistemologies under them, just like learning management systems embody epistemologies and pedagogies. Far too few people engage in those issues. Canvas gets sold to educational administrators by its looks, a lot like APA and MLA are sold to undergraduates.
@bibliolater @linguistics @ai For centuries, we've said that education solves problems like these.
Maybe we could try a broader education for academics? Maybe specialisation is part of what drives this blindness to one's own ignorance, the blindness that makes everyone an expert in rhetoric while actual rhetors are now so rare that hardly anyone knows that they ever existed.
@bibliolater @linguistics @ai How would you go about persuading people that they're not experts in something that they do poorly every day from the post and status of someone supposedly good at it?
As you can see here, I'm not going out of my way to win friends among them.
But I did, for a few years, support academics through their writing. They hated writing, and they hated the coercion to write badly. Might these people be where we begin?
I cannot agree more with this sentiment. I think that specialisation in education happens far too early and to the detriment of the student.
@bibliolater @linguistics @ai Back in the 19th century it made sense to expect every academic to write well. Now, the demand for specialisation, and for keeping up with such a deluge of literature (so much of it written to make reading all the more taxing), and the growing teaching and admin loads, make that no longer a reasonable expectation.
Could we outsource writing with the same legitimacy as when we outsource translation, statistical testing, genetic sequencing, publishing?
@libroraptor @bibliolater @linguistics @ai
Yes! But please - work with human technical writers, not AI. True AI does not exist, you'd just be burning resources to generate plausible-sounding word soup.
@AbramKedge @bibliolater @linguistics @ai That kind of AI doesn't exist, I agree. But there are other kinds like expert systems and logic engines that I think worth keeping.
I'm a human technical writer and editor, if you want one. I prefer to be a developmental editor, like a research colleague from the start, but funding models usually mean that I can't be called until the end, often to fix things that could easily have been avoided with early involvement. That's something to work on.
@bibliolater @linguistics @ai How does one fix immaturity, posturing and prejudice anywhere? I don't see it being easier to solve among academics than among any other group.
APA has matured greatly since its "let's be like physics" positivism phase but a few great thinkers really do not steer the minds of the many just trying to get another publication out in order to keep their jobs. And so many undergrads are told "APA style" or "MLA style" merely for obedience, not with critical purpose.