Humans are starting to sound like ChatGPT, study finds

The AI moment is here. The unprecedented rise of artificial intelligence is no longer just reshaping the productivity tools and search engines; it is actively altering the way humans speak.

A recent study conducted by Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin has unveiled that the influence of AI is not just limited to creativity and learning patterns, it is also changing how humans write and speak.

The dynamic change in speech patterns is evident as people are increasingly adopting language associated with AI chatbots including ChatGPT.

For this purpose, researchers examined more than 36,000 YouTube videos and 771,000 podcasts from before and after ChatGPT’s debut and compared the frequency of the most-favoured words.

The study has discovered the abrupt increase in the usage of certain words favoured by OpenAI’s ChatGPT since its first launch in 2022. The words like delve, boast, comprehend, swift, and meticulous have become more frequented in human speech, researchers noted.

The surge is visible not only in scripted videos and podcasts but also in daily conversation.

The research findings suggest “a scenario where machines, originally trained on human data and subsequently exhibiting their own cultural traits, can, in turn, reshape human culture.”

Closed cultural feedback loop

Chatbots are often trained on data from humans who are more inclined to use AI terms, marking the beginning of a closed cultural feedback loop. This reciprocal relationship between humans and bots will further influence speech patterns in significant ways.

The growing trust of people in AI

The increased use of these favoured words further highlights a growing trust of people in AI despite bots’ tendency to lie and hallucinate.

According to co-author Levin Brinkmann, “It’s natural for humans to imitate one another, but we don’t imitate everyone around us equally…We are more likely to copy what someone else is doing if we perceive them as being knowledgeable and important.”

Rising concerns of eroded linguistic diversity

The paper also shed light on the potential implications of AI on human culture and linguistic diversity.

“The human parroting of machine-speak raises concerns over the erosion of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the risks of scalable manipulation…Long standing norms of idea exchange, social identity, and authority may be reversed with direct implications for social dynamics.”

According to Mor Naaman of Cornell Tech, humans are also on the verge of losing emotional and personal elements in their communications. “We stop articulating our own thoughts and start expressing what AI structures for us,” Naaman noted.