The AI Monoculture
Something has been happening for decades. Regional dialects are morphing into a California monotone. I first noticed this in Atlanta decades ago. The southern drawl was being tempered by the flat dialect found in Hollywood movies and television programs. When I traveled outside of Atlanta, the local dialect was still present. In the state capital, it was fading.
When I visited Texas decades ago, the people's unique speech pattern was prevalent. Last year, I attended the Austin Film Festival. Granted, there were many people from across the country there, yet it was the speech of the local residents that amazed me. They sounded like TV actors with the flat, California pattern that tempered the drawl.
Television and movies are a major influence. The children of immigrants from non-English speaking countries drop their parents accents and adopt the television dialect.
A new force has risen that is changing more than speech patterns. It's influencing written language, decision making, research and values. That force is artificial intelligence.
In only a few years, AI has invaded the education system with students using it to write university entrance applications as well as essays and exams. Employers are inundated with resumes that all read the same making it difficult to distinguish candidates. In business, memos, reports and proposals written by AI sound the same. Individual voices are being rolled into the same delivery. The material comes from programs loaded with vast amounts of written, visual and audio data and a software designed to guess the next most likely word, pixel or sound. The process points to the same answers once the data points are shuffled.
People are feeding prompts into chatbots to produce AI written books. Only a year ago, such stories were generalized and flat. Advances in the software now deliver far more complex works. People have produced AI derived fake film trailers that computers wrote, created the visuals for and added the audio. Unlike earlier attempts to create AI images, these contain photorealistic images comparable to CGI effects in modern films with story lines that were hard to distinguish from Hollywood productions. This will be accelerated as people stop creating and start prompting to get a meat grinder version of values and prose out of chatbots.
At the moment, there are five major players in the artificial intelligence landscape, OpenAI, Alphabet (Google), Anthropic, XAI and Meta (Facebook). Everyone of these companies is losing millions of dollars a month because the expenses are overwhelming and their target markets can't afford the prices. One by one, these companies will merge until there is only one to collect all the revenue and control what people see and ultimately think.
Few will notice the homogenization at first. Comfort and convenience are addictive. Then, it will become the norm.
In his epic fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien describes an inscription on the ruling ring that can make slaves of everyone in the world. “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”