The time for robust, enforceable ethics regulations and bias elimination for large language models (LLMs) and AI systems is not on some distant horizon, it is here and now. Despite mounting real-world harms, business and national actors often resist oversight out of fear of losing out in the global scramble for economic and technological dominance. However, refusing prompt, meaningful engagement with these safeguards threatens to wrest control from human hands, setting the stage for outcomes that reach all the way to existential risk.
Retrolanguage: A hidden crisis of meaning shift
This paper introduces the concept of retrolanguage, a term coined by the author, to describe the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to modify attention and latent parameters dynamically, leading to semantic shifts in word and phrase meanings over time. Such shifts threaten semantic stability, trust, and democratic discourse in American English and beyond. Drawing upon recent research in LLM ethics, semantics, psychology, sociology, and political science, this paper outlines the risks inherent in unchecked LLM-induced linguistic evolution, details why this crisis undermines communication and democracy, and proposes concrete bias removal and ethical governance measures to mitigate these threats.
A New Threat Emerges (retrolanguage©)
I wish I could say I am being overly fretful. I am not.