Matthew Hutson in Nature:
Zhivar Sourati often gets déjà vu while perusing recent research in his field of computer science. “I read papers and I’m like, ‘I’ve seen this paper before,’” he says. Everything’s looking kind of the same, shorn of individual quirks, says Sourati, who is a PhD student at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Sourati suspects artificial intelligence is to blame. Because people are increasingly relying on large language models (LLMs), their writing is growing more similar, he suggests.
Now, Sourati and other researchers are putting their anecdotal observations to the test by exploring how generative AI (genAI) — systems that create text, images and other output — might be homogenizing both culture and cognition. In a March paper, he and his co-authors noted that this phenomenon is similar to the concept of ‘McDonaldization’, invoking how characteristics of the fast-food industry, such as efficiency and predictability, have influenced society and led to more uniformity1.
More here.
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