You can almost hear the em dashes
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.
