Sumanth Pandugula on X: "My thoughts on how AI-generated text is breaking the language barriers for majority of the world. https://t.co/70pHTz5tWx" / X<br>Post

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Sumanth Pandugula

@summyfeb12

My thoughts on how AI-generated text is breaking the language barriers for majority of the world.<br>The Cargo, Not the Ship. Focus on the idea, not how they are delivered.<br>TL;DR - Pay attention to the idea or concept the AI-generated text is trying to convey, not the syntax around the idea like the language and vocabulary used.<br>Human Brain<br>Ideas and thoughts are complex and abstract multidimensional entities in the human brain. An individual can construct multiple such entities, often weaving them many times through several layers in their head. But how do they convey the same rich information to the person next to them? Let’s say I have an idea about how the future of human life could look in a couple hundred million years. It’s very easy to build all the layers in my head. For example, I can imagine intergalactic travel using large ships, watching sunrises on Mars like it’s a day trip, and taking a vacation on the most beautiful planet in the Andromeda galaxy and then heading home to my under-ice, underwater pod on Europa. For you reading this, you would be building a very different image of what those things would look like. But if we both could show how we imagined this in our head, they will vary a lot on multiple levels starting with how many space movies we watched to how imaginative we are to our ability to describe it via a medium such as text, images etc and our expertise in each. When beings of the same or various kinds started to communicate with each other, they used different mechanisms; we can see that across evolutionary history. Smaller fish communicate by moving their whole bodies, and whales communicate using songs. Early humans conveyed their thoughts through cave paintings, signs, etc. Over the last fifty thousand years, we have come a long way from images. Yet the most spoken language by humanity so far relies on 26 letters and a few hundred thousand words.<br>Lossy Language<br>I read this article "Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future" by @waitbutwhy 9 years ago, back in 2017, and the main takeaway for me from that was that ideas and thoughts are very high resolution in the human brain, and when we convey them to others using language, we are losing a lot of that resolution to the medium, such as language - and that’s before factoring in things like that individual’s expertise in the above-said language, the strength of their vocabulary, and skills like reading, writing skills, storytelling, drawing, etc. The goal of @neuralink was to eliminate the use of language and communicate ideas and thoughts without losing any resolution. Maybe we will have that someday, but let’s talk about what we have today and what we are trying to do.<br>We are adding more words to the English vocabulary every year, and we may keep doing that for a lot longer from now, but the most spoken language in the world is only spoken by 20% of the population; the rest of the world speaks different languages. We have been trying to solve the problem of translation for years, and with AI we are finally getting somewhere. Yet keep in mind, you are already losing a lot of resolution when converting ideas from your mind to your native language, and you lose a good chunk of it again in translation.<br>Level Playing Field<br>When generative AI became mainstream after @openai released ChatGPT. A lot of people find it easier to convey their ideas to other people. Because AI can write your ideas elaborately, generate images, and translate without the barriers of expertise in the language. I do understand the obsession with penalizing the AI-generated text. Frontier models trying to sign the text generated using their models, @Pangram detecting the AI-generated text and the whole campaign calling them slop instead of trying to understand the idea in the first place. I think humans are partially responsible for what we are seeing with AI-generated text today. William Shakespeare could have very well conveyed how Brutus was manipulated into backstabbing Caesar in less than 200 words; he used 20,000 and I had to spend good 2 years in high school reading it. I am sure JK Rowling could’ve conveyed her message through Harry Potter by not writing a million words. This could be true for all authors, but they had a specific reason to do it and the context is different in every scenario. We trained our models using text written for print media and that’s not what is expected of it in social media. The writer who uses AI should be solely responsible for limiting the words where necessary and thoroughly proof-reading it to make sure the idea they want to send across with the level of detail they intended before they send it across. I do acknowledge the onus on the reader to go through hundreds of lines of generated text to understand the idea...