I’ve noticed an increase in posts or articles in the past year, mentioning in various ways that ‘everyone is starting to sound like AI’.
Now, even if I have my own beef with the tipic of AI, as someone who doesn’t loathe words I would dare say that using more of them is not a bad thing. They’re better for expressing thoughts (if any), better for expressing intricacies and nouances one might want to convey, better at transforming someone into an individual that also thinks not just scrolls, swipes, beeps or bops.
So, lets not foster a hostile attitude towards words just because AI uses more of them than the average person, and maybe delve into a book or two and embark on a journey of making ones vocabulary more intricate and robust.
If we see a word we don’t know, in the paper that AI wrote for us, let’s broaden our tapestry of words and thoughts or maybe just have the plain curiosity to open up a thesaurus and learn the definition of the particular word we don’t know, so that we don’t get stuck with the 300 word vocabulary of a toddler, or of the current leader of ‘the free world’.
Having a broader vocabulary is not a bad thing, even if it begins with the report that AI has written for us, out of a one sentence prompt. It’s bad only if you use it and don’t know what it means.
As I see it, we’re not starting to sound more like AI, AI sounds like us (of course it does, it stole all the existing written material on the internet since its beginnning), or as we should sound in a civilized and evolved world.
For now though, we just have to settle for living in a world that gets you flagged as AI for knowing too many words, even if we don’t like it.
And yes, delve, intricate, robust, nouance, convey, foster, express, transform are some of the words that allegedly AI uses more than the average person (I googled it, I have no actual idea if it is so, I’m not perfect).
Artwork: Saint Jerome Writing • Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio