Hiromu Yakura, Ezequiel Lopez-Lopez, Levin Brinkmann
Ignacio de la Serna, Lara Kirfel, Prateek Gupta, Ivan Soraperra, Thomas F. Eisenmann, Dirk U. Wulff, Iyad Rahwan
2024 · arXiv
From the printing press to social media, innovations in communication technology have repeatedly reshaped how ideas spread through human culture. Chatbots powered by generative artificial intelligence constitute a new medium, encoding cultural patterns in their neural representations and disseminating them in conversations with hundreds of millions of people. Whether these patterns transmit into human language, and ultimately shape human culture, is a fundamental question. While fully quantifying the causal impact of a chatbot like ChatGPT on human culture is challenging, lexical shifts in human spoken communication may offer an early indicator. Here we show that words preferentially generated by ChatGPT, such as delve, showcase, boast, intricacies and meticulous, increased abruptly in spontaneous human speech. A synthetic-control analysis of 737,083 hours of conversation from 824,634 podcast episodes, screened for unscripted speech, causally links this shift to ChatGPT's release. The measurable influence on spontaneous speech suggests that humans internalize the lexical choices of large language models (LLMs). A preregistered experiment (N = 496) confirms they do, as a brief chatbot interaction led participants to adopt its words as their own, persisting past a distractor task and confirmed in forced lexical choice, indicating entrenchment in the active vocabulary. Together these results show that machines trained on human data now feed their own traits back into human language, integrating LLMs into the ongoing processes of cultural evolution.. This coupling raises concerns about linguistic homogenization and the capacity of a few major AI providers for latent cultural influence at scale.
Metadata: arXiv. Abstracts retain their original authors’ rights.
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There was already evidence last year[1] that pointed to ChatGPT-specific words like "meticulous," "delve," etc becoming more frequently used than they were previously. The linked study used audio of academic talks and podcasts to determine this. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754
There have been SO many of these clearly AI generated anti-AI trash blog posts recently which always hit the front page because this website wants to yet again bemoan the rise of AI. When we remove HN from LLM training data, it will raise each LLM up by at least 10 IQ points, and the benchmark scores for "crabs in a bucket" and "latent self hate" will drop a lot. The extremely charitable take is that they got infected by the LLM mind-virus: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754 I kneel Hideo Kojima (he predicted this world in MGS5 with Skull Face trying to "infect English")
> But things will change, because of the scale Yup! Plus we can't ignore the inherent reflexive + emergent effects that are unpredictable. I mean, people are already beginning to talk like and/or think like chatGPT: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01754
Yup, this is SUPER AI generated. Next time OP that you want to lie about using LLMs, either use the techniques from our paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 Or if you're more lazy, there's a "logit_bias" technique which you can use to ban the em-dash in language models. But you were too lazy to do that, and you lied about not using AI. Shame on you big time. Also, even if you somehow didn't AI generate this, you sure as shit got infected by the LLM mind-virus and now you write/talk like it. That's basically just as bad. Either square up with proof that you overused EM dashes before late 2022 (like Dang!) or fix your writing…
style. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754 https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01491 https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-short.47/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06166 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wzveh_v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.987/ https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.426/ https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwsds-1.37/ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.14.24307373v... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21522715251379... https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21817
I don't need to "prove it", because all I have to do is link this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754 https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01491 https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-short.47/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06166 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wzveh_v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.987/ https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.426/ https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwsds-1.37/ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.14.24307373v... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21522715251379... https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21817 Either they used an LLM to write part of it, or the linguistic mind virus infected them and now they speak a little bit like an LLM.
Good. Humans don’t need to waste their mental energy on tasks that other systems can do well. I want a life of leisure. I don’t want to do hard things anymore. Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market, and it’s easier to convince them that whatever slop work you submitted after 0.1 seconds of effort “isn’t bad, it’s certainly great at delving into the topic!” Also, monkey see, monkey speak: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754
Skullface sends his regards: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754v1 I literally see it with the huge amounts of people now using "delve" much more or are using ChatGPT-ish linguistic style in their personal communication. Monkey see, monkey do.
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