Like with asbesthos and lead paint, we are building surprises today for the people of tomorrow!

And asbestos and lead paint was actually useful.

If we focus only on the impact on linguistics, I predict things will go something like this:

As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.

Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles. Despite this, vocabulary and semantics as a whole become more uniform. Spelling errors and typos become increasingly rare.

In parallel, people start using LLMs to summarize content in a style they prefer.

Both sides of this gradually converge. Content gets explicitly written in a way that is optimized for consumption by an LLM, perhaps a return to something like the semantic web. Authors write content in a way that encourages a summarizing LLM to summarize as the author intends for certain explicit areas.

Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before, and perhaps less ambiguous. Language is the primary interface an LLM uses with humans, so even if LLM use becomes baseline for many things, if information is not being communicated effectively then an LLM would be failing at its job. I'm personifying LLMs a bit here but I just mean it in a game theory / incentive structure way.

Hopefully the brainrot will mean older developers, who know how to code the old-fashioned way, don't get replaced so quickly..

It'll be a lot like giving children all the answers without teaching them how to get the answers for themselves.

Most people will continue to become dumber. Some people will try to embrace and adapt. They will become the power-stupids. Others will develop a sort of immune reaction to AI and develop into a separate evolutionary family.