Nuclear Words
You’re a genius and here’s why
Let’s say you say something to me and I call you a genius. You will have an amazing chemical reaction in your brain, and you will feel amazing. He’s coming, baby.
Then let’s say you’re telling me something and I say, “You are a stupid idiot.” Another chemical reaction will happen in your brain, and you will feel disturbed. You might even feel angry. You might want to come after me.
There’s a lot that goes on in our brains when we encounter different words, and that is the power of language. Language inherently has really no meaning. It’s just sounds and symbols, but we have together aligned on what a dog means and what a chair means and what it means to insult someone or praise someone. So the words carry weight.
Researchers at Virginia Tech and collaborating institutions found that emotionally charged words can alter the brain’s chemistry within fractions of a second. By directly measuring dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine in conscious human brains, they discovered that positive, negative, and neutral words produced distinct chemical patterns depending on the brain region and even the hemisphere involved. Positive words, for example, were associated with increased serotonin in the thalamus, while dopamine responded differently on the left and right sides of the anterior cingulate cortex. The important point is not that every positive word releases one “happy chemical,” but that once the brain has learned a word’s meaning, it no longer processes that word as a meaningless sound. It responds to the meaning biologically. (source)
Okay, let’s park this idea for a second.
Now think you go to another country. You don’t know their language, but just for fun, you learn a few bad words, really bad words, and you just say those sounds as you’re told. For you, it carries no meaning at all. It does not impact you. You almost, like, find it amusing, whereas the person you are saying it to feels really hurt, disgusted, angry, and so forth, depending on the severity of the bad word.
Now let’s bring these two ideas together and consider the point that LLMs don’t really feel anything, yet they generate some of the most powerful text that can impact your brain, my brain, and everybody else’s brain.
This has brought me to a conclusion that we have put in the world something way stronger than the nuclear bomb, because this carries with itself a way to produce emotions and reactions in the reader. Now it really depends on what your input is. And trust me, I have full AI user, I work in tech, and I am a believer in tech, but no matter what you write, it still spews out words that carry meaning to you.
LLMs are just a toddler repeating sounds. They don’t know if F*CK is bad. All they know is when they do that, there’s a certain reaction in adults so they keep repeating it.
I’m trying to wrap my head around this concept for about two weeks now. Like, what does this mean? Maybe this means nothing, because they don’t generate words unless we prompt them.
But then I’ve been working with lot of agentic tools, and they generate words without prompting. They do emojis. I’m trying out this new agentic tool called Instinct. My wife called it the best product ever made, and she also said the emojis are one of the best features, that it reacts to your text.
I can’t seem to comprehend all this. This feels like we have put something more powerful than the nuclear bomb out in the world.
to be continued…
I love you all. Keep going!
Aakash
proof of human writing
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Originally published on substack.