I starting to see an increase of random serendipities, perhaps I'm looking for them, in part that's how it works, but...

I was talking to a friend about an idea I had, to build something, he said, "yes! I'm doing that too", then I said "with this specific tooling because is ideal ... " .. he said .. "me too! same tooling", I said "what a coincidence!! amazing ...wait a minute, have you been talking with Claude about this? " ... of course we both did.

My opinion is that that LLMs are influencing us more that we think, and it makes us reach the same conclusions and making us think it was our idea, or that we were the ones steering the conversation.

Perhaps you feel that Claude stole your phrase but I don't think 2 days is enough for that phrase to make it to a re-training, I think it might be more subtle and worse, perhaps you wrote that phrase influenced by the conversation, and the other person did the same.

Just a theory, I can't prove it. But if you think about it, LLMs conversation are the most plausible choices, so it is logical that we all users of this machine are going to tend to converge on the most plausible way of thinking and talking.

No offense, but perhaps that rhyme that you though it was original, it is actually the most plausible in that context.

I assume this is happening all over the place, because I’ve had the same experience.

The fun part is extending it to internal development at corporations. Company A thinks they’re doing interesting competitive work, but are actually being quietly shepherded to build exactly the same things in more or less the same ways as their competitors.

The weirdness of human individuals (even setting aside amorphous concepts like “taste”) is an asset because it provides occasion for actual differentiation, and that noise may turn out to be necessary for the emergence of value in the long run.

I am not sure we always need a retraining. Even that can potentially be done but putting it in a knowledge graph can be quick. We don't know the exact workings. I understand the shepherding logic you are explaining and I have felt the exact things when writing code recently because the best thing to do is often unique in coding circumstances. But a random phrase being repeated in 2 days has a much lower probability.