As of lately, this is a sentence that comes to my mind very frequently – whether it’s reading essays, mails, articles, or even hearing people (real people may I add, at least I’m pretty sure of that) speak in calls. This article by Sara Parker in The Verge may have an explanation for this phenomenon. Research shows that the use of generative AI does indeed alter the vocabulary we are using:

“Words like “prowess” and “tapestry,” which are favored by ChatGPT, are creeping into our vocabulary, while words like “bolster,” “unearth,” and “nuance,” words less favored by ChatGPT, have declined in use”.

As somebody who has spent a good amount of my lifetime in academia, I have learned to love language as a tool to think and sharpen my thoughts by putting them on paper or formulate sentences. Often doing this in German instead of in English helps me tremendously to cut out unnecessary fluff and identify passages where I am not as clear in what I would like to express and cannot easily hide in flowery expressions. So what does using generative AI do to our thought process?

“Instead of articulating our own thoughts, we articulate whatever AI helps us to articulate…we become more persuaded.” says Mor Namaan, professor of information science at Cornell Tech.

Using AI to help formulating texts quickly will not go away and frankly, I’m also using this often. However, we need to be aware of the value of language as a cultural technique, the ability to formulate as a tool to improve one’s thinking, and the linguistic identifiers that make us human and allow us to communicate as such with others.