The Language of Pain: How Human Trauma Shapes AI
Every piece of text we use to train AI carries invisible imprints of pain. Every news article about conflict, every heated social media exchange, every story of struggle and survival - they're all teaching AI not just language, but the pain patterns woven into that language.
Pain has been on my mind. Not the physical kind, but the kind that gets passed down through generations. The kind that lives in our words, our reactions, our ways of seeing the world.
You can see it everywhere once you start looking. Parents who yell at their kids because their parents yelled at them. People who push others away because they learned early that closeness means hurt. Whole families living with the ghost of poverty in their language - "save everything," "money doesn't grow on trees," "be practical" - even generations after the actual hardship has passed.
These aren't just habits or choices. They're survival mechanisms, decisions made in moments of pain that got passed down because they worked once, because they helped someone survive something terrible. And here's another thought: we're feeding all of this into artificial intelligence.
