AI is making us sound the same-and killing our personal expression

More than a third of all internet web pages published since ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch were authored by AI, according to the Pew Research Center. And the writing is becoming simpler than ever. That flood of AI-generated language may also be changing the way humans write. A new paper in Nature Human Behavior finds that LLMs can push people’s writing toward a narrower set of linguistic norms, reducing stylistic diversity and obscuring some of the identity signals embedded in our words. Three years ago, lead researcher Zhivar Sourati read The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us, James Pennebaker’s book that explored how people’s personal values, backgrounds, and beliefs can lead them to communicate the same ideas using different words. At the same time, LLMs were becoming more popular, and Sourati began to wonder whether the tech might reduce that linguistic diversity. “We were kind of asking, what would actually happen when everyone’s text is going through the same models?” Sourati says. “If you have this layer on top of everyone’s text, would you change any of these artifacts that we know about people’s texts? Would it affect it in any significant way? What are the implications?” So, he set to work to find out. First, Sourati conducted a time-series analysis using approximately 80,000 academic papers, 400,000 news articles, and 300,000 Reddit stories written before and after ChatGPT’s introduction. He found that after the adoption of AI writing tools, variation in writing complexity increasingly converged toward common stylistic norms. The trend was consistent across all three datasets. Next, Sourati and his team conducted a more traditional experiment. They had GPT-3.5, Gemini, and Meta’s Llama 3 rewrite human-authored texts using a variety of prompts. While the models largely preserved the texts’ meaning, they reduced variation in writing complexity 21% to 50%. But Sourati wanted to get more specific about the societal implications: How are LLMs eroding the signals of individual identity in our writing?