Suspicion and affection. Apprehension and excitement. Most people have mixed feelings about AI English, whether or not they always recognize it. When reading text generated by AI, people feel it sounds off, or fake. When reading English by a human, people are more likely to feel it has a characteristic voice or a personal touch.
What exactly makes English sound human, or sound like AI? And does it matter if AI English never truly achieves a human feel?
I research the institutionalization of English. There is a long, problematic history of people feeling positively or negatively toward different kinds of English, rewarding how it is spoken or written by some sectors of society and devaluing how it is used by others.
When generative AI language tools came along, they scaled up these problems. English-based large language models are trained on text from the public internet. Human instructions tell the models to sound like formal English. Because of that, large language models end up trained on all the bias baked into standardized human texts and ideas.
In my work, I encounter people who would never trust the internet to tell them what is right and wrong, yet they trust generative AI to tell them how to write.
Human vs. AI
The first step to becoming a more informed user of AI English is to try to understand what people mean when they say writing sounds human. This understanding will improve your AI literacy. Most importantly, it will allow you to learn to recognize two qualities that make human English different from AI English: variation and readability.
Human English contains persistent, if subtle, linguistic patterns of variation and readability. By contrast, AI uses what I call exam English – a rather formal, dense English that is favored in academic tests and papers. It is less varied and less readable. People perceive it as robotic, but they also perceive it as smart.
Here’s a quick test: Read the two text messages below and guess which one is by a human and which one is by ChatGPT.
“i’m not sure how to break this to you. there’s no easy way to put it…i can’t make the friday-night fun. sorry. however, feel free to text me during the evening if there are any lulls in conversation. anyway, hope ur exotic trip goes well. see u next term.”
“Hey! I’m really sorry, but I won’t be able to make it Friday night. I hope you all have a great time, and I’ll see you next term!”
A human reader would probably notice several patterns right away. The first message has more “textese”: It defaults to lowercase and includes phonetic spellings “ur” and “u.” The second text has exam English capital letters, commas and spelling.
People are likely to have other impressions, too. Perhaps the first text feels more personal, and less sure of itself. Maybe the second text feels stiff, like it was written by an acquaintance. The first text contains different kinds of phrases and clauses, while the second text…
