I figure they can either help or harm, depending on implementation:

Huggingface ( I always think of the "face-huggers" in Alien, when I see that name.. and have NO idea why they thought that association would be a Good Thing(tm) ) has a LLM which apparently can do Sanskrit.

Consider, though:

All the Indigenous languages, where we've only actually got a partial-record of the language, and the "majority rule, minority extinguishes" "answer" of our normal process .. obliterated all native speakers of that language ( partly through things like residential-schools, etc )..

now it becomes possible to have an LLM for that specific language, & to study the language, even though we've only got a piece of it.

This is like how we've sooo butchered the ecology that we can only study pieces of it, now, there's simply too-much missing from what was there a few centuries ago, so we're not looking at the origina/proper thing, either in ecologies or in languages.

sigh

This wasn't supposed to be depressing.

Consider how search-engines have altered how we have to communicate..

In order to FORCE a search-engine to consider a pair-of-words to be a single-term, you have to remove all intervening space/hyphens/symbols from between them.

ClimatePunctuation is a single search-token, but "Climate Punctuation" is two separate, unrelated terms, which may or may-not appear in the results.

It's obscene.

I'm almost mad-enough to want legislation forcing search-engines to respect some kind of standard set of defaults ( add more terms == narrowing the search, ie defaulting to Boolean AND, as one example ),

so they'd stop enshittifying our lives while "pretending" that they're helping.

( there was a Science news site which would not permit narrowing-of-search, and I hope they fscking died.

Making search unusable on a science site??

probably some "charity" who pays most of their annual-budget to their administration, & only exists for their entitlement.

I'm saying that after having encountered that religion in charities. )

Interesting:

search-engines alter our use-of-language,

social-sites do too,

LLM's do too,

marketing/propaganda does,

astroturfing does,

.. it begins looking like real events are .. rather-insignificant .. influences in our languages?

Hm...