Are you worried about AI? It's about to get worse as study shows people now speak like ChatGPT

Date:
Thu, 26 Jun 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Description:
Our conversations are starting to sound suspiciously like AI chatbots, and we might not even realize we are mimicking ChatGPT.

FULL STORY ======================================================================A new study shows people sometimes sound a lot like ChatGPT when they speak The evidence is in their vocabulary and phrasing This shift could flatten emotional nuance and have everyone sound the same

Have you recently heard a TED Talk, or perhaps from a friend who teaches at a college, tell you about their plan to delve into a new realm and encourage
you to be more adept at some activity? There's a chance they've been
possessed by the spirit of ChatGPT. Or maybe just spent a lot of time interacting with AI chatbots.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development think the
latter is becoming a real trend. They've released a new report indicating
that a linguistic shift has begun in the wake of ChatGPT's release. Academics and other lecture-adjacent people are starting to sound like AI, their speech peppered with some of the same words that occur far more often in AI-produced text than average, like meticulous, adept, delve, and realm.

The researchers analyzed 280,000 academic YouTube videos across more than 20,000 channels. The change was easy to spot, with some of the words popping up more than 50 percent more often than would be expected. And these aren't AI-written scripts, it's just educated people inadvertently pulling from the AI dictionary. Whether they are using em dashes is harder to tell, but they may well be hidden among the words.

I should also say that someone using those words doesn't mean they are being influenced by AI writing. I can point to writing of mine going back decades that uses all of the examples of AI vocabulary precisely because they feel evocative and interesting. AI thesaurus

It might seem like a minor issue, but it might portend a potentially deeper problem. The researchers found the AI-influenced words werent just more frequent, they were replacing more vivid, less structured language. What once might have been a passionate, complex argument would become dull and antiseptic. Sanding the texture off our language and always defaulting to the phrases used by AI could, at its worst, reduce the color, emotion, and regional quirks that enliven how we speak. Linguistic diversity doesnt thrive on autocomplete.

It could even mean a decline in our manners. There's a debate about whether it's worth being polite to AI chatbots . Should you say please to ChatGPT or thank you to Gemini? Conversation is conversation. If we are brusque with AI enough, it will bleed into how we speak to other humans, and the world might feel a little less friendly.

At the same time, its hard to resist completely. If youre an academic trying to write a paper or a content manager trying to meet a deadline, ChatGPT can be a useful co-author. It writes cleanly and is often direct and even
incisive in its analysis. But the tradeoff is a voice thats often monotonous in long-form, no matter the prompt. And if you rely on it too often, that voice becomes yours.

Its worth noting that weve seen this pattern before. Technology has always shaped language. The telegraph encouraged brevity, and telephones made
"hello" the standard greeting. Texting gave us LOL and ROFL. Twitter had us saying "hashtag" out loud, while emojis have people saying "upside down
smiley face" in actual conversation. Were emulating something not because its natural, but because its what were now trained to expect.

It's hard to miss the irony of creating an AI chatbot to mimic humans, only
to have humans start mimicking AI. Odd as it is to contemplate, you may have to pay attention to how you speak and the words you use lest you fall into
the vocabulary your AI pal uses. Delve into the meticulous research on what makes your language unique and become adept in the realm of uncommon idioms. You might also like Anthropics new AI-written blog is more of a technical treat than a literary triumph AI can write a hit song, but it cant lift your soul or break your heart Audibles AI narration sounds impressive, but I'd rather hear the story told by a human



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/are-you-worried-ab out-ai-its-about-to-get-worse-as-study-shows-people-now-speak-like-chatgpt


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