[padolsey]

Because it's fun, I'd like to pose the contrary position that AI will actually make us more different. Perhaps dangerously so.

Many people don't understand the nature of LLMs nor how rabbit-hole-y a long context will necessarily become. And so as they talk to it, they move slowly further away from its corpus and towards a private shared meme-space, where they can have in-jokes and private moments never reconciled with a base reality. It's like the most private echo-chamber that can possibly exist (besides in our own heads).

So the full fledged dystopia might not be when where we are all alike, but where we are all lacking sufficient bridges of commonality between our tiny chambers. Our samenesses are becoming more local, the distances between them greater and greater. Many small, tight clusters with high divergence, minimal cross-cluster edges, and vanishing mutual information with global signals. :/

[DrewADesign]

My gut says using chatbots like this will be a subculture like online gaming and not ubiquitous like social media. I'd be very surprised if most people were interested in doing that.

[AlecSchueler]

I feel like the linguistic nature of them is more appealing to a broad audience than games or social media.

[DrewADesign]

IMO What makes online games and social media different from LLM chat bots is what’s (supposed to be) on the other end: people. Some people seem to feel it more than others, but human connection is one of the most fundamental facets of human existence. It’s compelling because there’s another human being you’re sharing an experience with, not because there’s a method of generating the text that would result from that. Even when people interact with bots in those other online realms, most of them are only doing so because they think it’s a person.

Meta removed the ai accounts from Instagram because most of the people that even gave the feature a second thought, were just mad because they couldn’t block them. I’ll bet they were NOT cheap to implement, and they were not some nascent bing chat era blunder— it was 2025. I think that’s a harbinger of future ‘socialize with LLMs’ feature adoption.

[justonceokay]

Most people aren’t conversing with the AI they just use it as Google 2.0

[AlecSchueler]

Source?

[joules77]

Philosophers say Modernity already produces that effect - "shared stories" start evaporating as individuals start focusing on their own needs, interests, goals etc (see Charles Taylor's The Secular Age). No AI required.

[Antibabelic]

We still share a baseline reality. This is how people who are stranded in places with unfamiliar languages and cultures are still able to build bridges.