The unnerving thing is that now, with hundreds of millions of people regularly engaging with chatbots, English-speaking humans are starting to talk like the inhuman communicator on the other side. For example, ChatGPT uses the word “delve” at higher rates than people generally use when writing or speaking English. As Florida State University researchers Tom S. Juzek and Zina B. Ward have found, this likely results from small biases and errors in the human feedback process compounding over time. Employees of AI companies checking over large language model (LLM) outputs are often low-wage workers from countries such as Nigeria and Kenya, where “delve” is used at higher rates than in American or British English.
Indeed, a study reported in Scientific American last month found that people have started saying “delve” more in spontaneous, spoken conversations. This isn’t AI’s doing anymore; we’ve started internalizing its biases and repeating them by ourselves. I say “we” because even those in the anti-“delve” faction aren’t exempt. We might avoid using the most well-known ChatGPT giveaways, but so many words are appearing with unnatural frequency that we can’t possibly avoid them all. Are we also supposed to stop using the chatbot-overused “inquiry”? Or “surpass”? There’s too much to keep track of.
“AI is making us all speak and write alike,” says the umpteenth journalist in the last month to reference the same study in the same tone of hand-wringing concern about bias and diversity. Lawd’ve mussy! Can you imagine how horrible it would be if an entire class of people got trapped in a media silo and started mindlessly imitating one another?
