I have noticed similar phenomena with Claude, where its vocabulary subtly shifts how I think/frame/write about things or points me to subtle gaps in my own understanding. And I also usually come around to understand that it's often not arbitrary. But I do think some confirmation bias is at play: when it tries to shift me into the wrong directions repeatedly, I learn how to make it stop doing that.
It definitely adds a layer of cognitive load, in wrangling/shepherding/accomodating/accepting the unpredictable personalities and stochastic behaviors of the agents. It has strong default behaviors for certain small tasks, and where humans would eventually habituate prescribed procedures/requirements, the LLM's never really internalize my preferences. In that way, they are more like contractors than employees.
If this was more than just a gut reaction [0], I have a tough time navigating what swings this topic between scary and not scary for you.
Unless you're a true and invested believer of souls, free will, and other spiritualistic nonsense (or have a vested political affiliation to pretend so), it should be tautological that everything you read and experience biases you. LLM output then is no different.
If you are a believer, then either nothing ever did, or LLMs are special in some way, or everything else is. Which just doesn't make sense to me.
[0] It's jarring to observe the boundaries of one's agency, sure, but LLMs are really nothing special in this way. For example, I somewhat frequently catch myself using words and phrases I saw earlier during the day elsewhere, even if I did not process them consciously.
Just like with absolutely any other tool, their value is in what it enables humans using them to accomplish.
E.g., a hammer doesn't do anything, and neither does a lawnmower. It would be silly to argue (just because these tools are static objects doing nothing in the absence of direct human involvement) that those tools don't have a very clear value.
Seems equally silly to me to suggest that hammers and lawnmowers don't do anything, but I mean here we are.
When people use other people like tools, i.e. use them to enable themselves to accomplish something, do those people cease to do things as well? Or is that not a terminology you recognize as sensible maybe?
I appreciate that for some people the verb "do" is evidently human(?) exclusive, I just struggle to wrap my head around why. Or is this an animate vs. inanimate thing, so animals operating tools also do things in your view?
How do you phrase things like "this API consumes that kind of data" in your day to day?
It definitely adds a layer of cognitive load, in wrangling/shepherding/accomodating/accepting the unpredictable personalities and stochastic behaviors of the agents. It has strong default behaviors for certain small tasks, and where humans would eventually habituate prescribed procedures/requirements, the LLM's never really internalize my preferences. In that way, they are more like contractors than employees.