Language is Who I am, Now They are Digitalizing ME.
- Yujie Pan
- Feb 25
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 1
Our thoughts are composed of language. The more complicated the language, the more complicated our thoughts -- just like how infants have simple thoughts because they don't know any words, and grownups have more complex thoughts because they have a larger vocabulary. Language also helps shape thoughts. I have a lot of different ramblings in my brain, they make me feel a certain way and I assume meaning out of informal feelings. By putting these ramblings into writing, I create new logic with syntax and precise words, hence assign a formalized but different meaning than what I initially started with -- vibes and feelings. By formalizing my thoughts I can communicate with ALL the people who speak my language, which is insanely powerful as language, unlike art, has limited interpretative flexibility. If I say I love my cat, then ain't no flipping way I hate my cat. So ALL the people who speak my language understand that I have emotional ties to my cat, and they can use this information to their benefit.
Language is our weapon to unite the people. The superpower of communication persuades and recruits, and with a united front we can DEMAND change. The techno-supremacist leaders of our world fear a united front against them. They know that language, used not in their favor, will be their demise... But language, used in their favor, will further satisfy their greed.
Everyone knows how to speak, so AI is technology everyone can use. I use AI. Increasingly I feel the lack of need to articulate my questions, since AI understands incoherent rambles. My logic and my argument is becoming duller bit by bit, and I stop thinking critically of the world. A world of stupid people is the easiest to herd for techno-supremacists, who claimed publicly that the only way for them to bring unfavorable political ideas to a global stage is through the feigned irreversible acceleration of technology.
Another issue is that language is becoming digitalized. I think it should be a widely-agreed fact that language does not equal to numbers does not equal to image. And any method or equation in large language models that performs the translation is purely PROBABILISTIC. There is no inherent emotion or truth or appeal in this content. Language is appealing because of the context of the charming person speaking it, images are appealing because of the lived experience of the person creating it. But AI content is digested through a black box of probability and math, which are cool, but not in language and images. Imagine if you are talking to a person, who calculated the highest probability of each word following the word you said, and spit it out into a coherent sentence. I don't think this is a conversation. I think this is an experiment. When I talk, I don't calculate numbers. I think in emotions and kinship, I think in reasoning and logic. I am so proficient in languages that words are a subconscious means to an end of connection, not an end I calculate like in the case of AI. Secondly, AI is based on English, and other languages spit in will be translated first to English, then spit into matrices of probabilistic calculation. This eradicates the nuance and context of unique languages and unifies the content into a highly (more like "most probabilistically") western mindset and logic. Language cannot be objectively equated to another language; thus, cultures are removed, social meaning and connection are removed in this sterile chatbot.

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