Nope. Authors must use the language of their intended audience, otherwise they risk failing as communicators. This does not at all mean dumbing down the language, but choosing the right language. A kindergarten show-and-tell will necessarily use very different language from a college graduation address or a technical review of a piece of audio electronics.
Maybe I should get ChatGPT to explain your point to me, or at least explain how we are disagreeing. No author would ask the reader to predict the next word based on popularity, as LLMs do, because soon the ideas the author is trying to convey would get lost, especially if the author is trying to convey a radical idea. But I am not asking authors to write at the most complex level irrespective of their audience, I'm stating that skilled authors will work to multiple levels with their audience so that all are challenged to expand their understanding. I'm also stating that in the case of the ChatGPT summary of one of my own posts, it got only the superficial meaning and not the subtext.
In kindergarten
especially language needs to expand the horizons of the listeners (who are not yet readers, of course). That expansion needs to be tempered and controlled, obviously, and that's what teachers do. But if writers feel compelled to fit their choices into the smallest box represented by their potential readers, how is that anything but dumbing it down? Language is about art as much as about communication. No group of kindergarteners will all be at the same level, and some will need the most basic instruction while others--who also need to be challenged--can grasp more complex ideas. There may even be some adults in the room that need to learn something. Good teachers, just as good authors, work at all those levels.
William F. Buckley, irrespective of your position on his politics, was an author of renown. He famously used vocabulary that exceeded the store of many of his readers (and challenged the best of them), and his critics often chided him for doing so. His response was, "keep reading." He told the story that one of his readers complained about his extended vocabulary, and he advised the reader to keep at it. A year or two later, the same reader complimented Mr. Buckley on taking the advice to simplify his vocabulary. Of course, Buckley had changed nothing. Readers share the responsibility of effective communications, and that means being prepared to be a student of the language. And in the realm of ideas, the readers are presumably the parties who have to make a leap of understanding, and that may not always be easy.
Writing to multiple levels of understanding isn't the same thing as adding complexity for the sake of complexity, or using big words for the sake of using big words (the Buckley anecdote notwithstanding). But one person's linguistic clutter is another person's clever and helpfully entertaining turn of phrase. The best primary-school teachers of my observation never seem to talk down to their students, even in kindergarten, and the teachers that do so don't, I suspect, get the same outcomes. When I read the biographies of the most accomplished, I find over and over again stories of teachers who challenged them to exceed their boundaries rather than teachers who talked down to their current boundaries.
All that said, I frequently find myself in the role of ChatGPT--summarizing and explaining the work of others to those who don't understand it but should (archaic term alert!) hearken to it. Usually, it's because neither party has the language skills to bridge the gap, and work needs to get done. But in these cases, my summary and explanation might be different for different recipients based on my understanding of their level. That means I have to know enough about the work being explained, and enough about the recipients, to be able to communicate it at levels appropriate to each. But my hope is that once the gap is bridged, I will no longer be needed in that role, at least for that group of students or readers. Effective teachers and authors know more than their students and readers, which is why we read them, and LLM's, in the end,
don't know anything.
Rick "language easy buttons may have unintended consequences" Denney
