LLMs are not the root cause here, they're just an accelerant. This was always inevitable with the progression of globalisation. Even before the internet, kids were watching Disney cartoons across the world (to be fair, often dubbed in the local language, but still an example of how global culture had been narrowing.) Perhaps this wasn't felt as strongly by those in the US quite as quickly as the rest of the world, because their culture just happened to be the source for many of these common elements.
There are always trade-offs. Globalisation has too many benefits for most to want to go back. It is up to us to intentionally cultivate our cultural uniqueness, but I'm not sure the corporate environment was ever the right place to do so, given it was already constrained by rules and etiquette, and motivated by a desire to encourage universal communication styles. Instead we have to take it upon our selves, in a very intentional way outside the corporate setting, to cultivate our own unique cultural expressions to thrive. Failure to do so either directly, or by proxy, means cultural extinction, as has been the case of many cultures that have passed before.
How are LLMs not the cause here? Reading online content is unpleasant these days because it all uses the same vocabulary and style. You can tell that an LLM wrote or edited it and it grates on you.
I'd need to see a study showing that this was already a trend, because globalization should increase linguistic complexity via exposure to other cultures. I certainly didn't use the term chaebol until the rise of Korean pop culture.
Per https://eoconf.com/index.php/icmse/article/view/578, globalization decreases complexity of individual languages through standardization, but increases overall complexity by creating new multilingual and hybrid forms.
Either way, LLMs are an entirely different mechanism for shrinking linguistic diversity than just people watching Disney.
> globalization should increase linguistic complexity via exposure to other cultures. I certainly didn't use the term chaebol until the rise of Korean pop culture.
Globalization moves every culture towards each other, with a higher weight on dominant cultures. You borrow a few Korean words, they borrow a few more English words. McDonalds pop up everywhere, everyone buys the same phones, hotels across the world converge towards a standard experience, and so on. The end result of such a process is a monoculture. Not now, not medium term, but I expect a few centuries of globalism would suffice to blend all extant cultures into a slurry.
Yup, I bounce very quickly as soon as I see typical formulaic LLM sentences. If the person online hasn't bothered writing the content, I don't see why I would waste time reading it.
Personally, I use LLM to do a quick pass on my writing to see if there's any glaring issues but would never ask it to reformulate what I wrote. I feel that you then lose the voice behind it.
I'd argue that Disney is responsible for a certain globalisation of culture but they help with the language problem. We're a multilingual family with me speaking French and my wife speaking Cantonese (with school being English and Mandarin). Disney is one of the very few cartoon maker that actually dubs in all 4 languages. It would not be this easy to find Cantonese content otherwise. And the quality of dubs is surprisingly high. They don't only translate, the actually adapt to the local culture.
I agree, Disneys’ dubs are generally of high quality.
Netflix seems to just grab radio announcers or something. The dubs are stripped of all emotions and acting. It’s like the voices are reading out an advertisement.
Obviously there’s exceptions, but Disney seems to employ actual actors. The dubs feel natural and native for the most part.
Yes and not only that, they translate lyrics so that it rhymes and preserve the connotations without doing literal translations. An example of that is Moana's French translation compared to original. The translation of the You're welcome song in Pour les Hommes (translate to For mankind) is a great example, the meaning of the song is kept while also keeping the same rhyme for the chorus.
Even something like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is very well translated. The Cantonese translation is very good and replaces "Hot Diggidy Dog" with something that works better for young Cantonese speakers...
Only criticism I'd make is that the subtitles tend to be more literal translations rather than transcribing the dubs.
> This was always inevitable with the progression of globalisation.
To a certain extent that's probably true, but there are limits to this. Local cultures, dialects etc. persevere despite open floodgates of communication. As an example take small-ish countries like Denmark or Sweden which despite generations of mixing still have distinct local dialects. It's not clear that those would just disappear naturally. With LLM tooling, such equalizing could be stronger though.
There are always trade-offs. Globalisation has too many benefits for most to want to go back. It is up to us to intentionally cultivate our cultural uniqueness, but I'm not sure the corporate environment was ever the right place to do so, given it was already constrained by rules and etiquette, and motivated by a desire to encourage universal communication styles. Instead we have to take it upon our selves, in a very intentional way outside the corporate setting, to cultivate our own unique cultural expressions to thrive. Failure to do so either directly, or by proxy, means cultural extinction, as has been the case of many cultures that have passed before.