"They'll take anyone - even English majors!": Putting the Language in Large Language Models

The quote in the title was encouragement I received about a program in 2012, when I was deciding to enroll in an M.S. in Software Engineering. I was not an English major. I was something considered even more useless during The Great Recession; I was a Global Studies major with a world language addiction.

• "Delve"
• "It's Not X, It's Y"
• Em dashes (-- RIP?)
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Let's review and discuss LLMs and code generation through a linguistic lens. Not just examples of the cues that tip us off that someone has sent us their Chat response unedited and our thoughts about the etiquette of that (although this is welcome!); but consideration of changing internet language norms. Because language.

“Language is humanity's most spectacular open source project.” ― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

One thing I love about software as an industry is it has given me greater opportunity for international collaboration than even my original major. My colleagues speak a multitude of mother tongues. A few coworkers have called into zoom from a new country every other week. But at the end of the day, we all produce code in languages that take their vocabulary mostly from English (our current business lingua franca). We'll explore exceptions, and look at how AI is also a language unto itself that is in turn shaping our human communication.

In the spirit of keeping Minnebar weird, come ready to experiment with LLMs and creative/collaborative output in a competitive race. I'll bring the markers and posterboard!

• Development
• AI/ML
• Community
• Other