The Social Impact of Generative LLM-Based AI

The research was partially supported by the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China and Office of Population Research at Princeton University. We are grateful to Wen Liu, Gou Wu, and Dean Minello for their excellent research assistance. The ideas expressed herein are those of the authors. Abstract Liking it or not, ready or not, we are likely to enter a new phase of human history in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) will dominate economic production and social life - the AI Revolution. Before the actual arrival of the AI Revolution, it is time for us to speculate on how AI will impact the social world. In this article, we focus on the social impact of generative LLMbased AI (GELLMAI), discussing societal factors that contribute to its technological development and its potential roles in enhancing both between-country and within-country social inequality. There are good indications that the US and China will lead the field and will be the main competitors for domination of AI in the world. We conjecture the AI Revolution will likely give rise to a post-knowledge society in which knowledge per se will become less important than in today's world. Instead, individual relationships and social identity will become more important. With the advent of Generative Large Language Model (LLM)-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and Bard from Google, it is natural to wonder about the social impact of this technology. In the remainder of this paper, we will refer to generative LLMbased AI simply as GELLMAI. The main objective of this paper is to explore, tentatively, the social impact of GELLMAI. While the question about the social impact of GELLMAI is undoubtedly important, any answers must be tentative and speculative at this point. We are still in the early stages of GELLMAI and may need to wait years, perhaps even decades, to fully understand its social implications. However, drawing from our experiences with past technologies in history, our current understanding of GELLMAI, empirical knowledge about the social world, and sociological reasoning, we can engage in preliminary and speculative discussions. We offer our account below. We believe that the social impact of GELLMAI is enormous, with the potential to revolutionize not only the production of goods and services but also to fundamentally alter the organization of human societies and the nature of daily life.