AI Chatbots Are Quietly Changing the Way Humans Speak — Here’s How
In just over two years, ChatGPT and other AI chatbots have become part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people. From writing emails to summarizing reports, they’ve helped us become more efficient. But now researchers say they’re doing something we didn’t quite expect: changing the actual words we use in everyday speech.
Turns out, we’re not just using AI — we’re starting to sound like it.
What’s Going On?
A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute recently analyzed over 1 million hours of spoken content from YouTube and podcast platforms. Their goal? To see if people’s language had changed since ChatGPT went public.
The result was significant. Certain words and phrases that frequently appear in chatbot-generated responses are now spiking in human conversation, even in unscripted speech.
These include terms like:
- Delve
- Meticulous
- Explore
- Realm
- Accurate
They're being called “GPT words.” You’ve probably used one without thinking about it.
The researchers believe this is part of a feedback loop: we train AI models on human text, the AI reflects that back in a slightly polished or formal style, and humans then absorb and repeat that language in real life, especially when the AI is seen as helpful or authoritative.
Why It Matters
It might sound like a harmless quirk of the digital age, but experts are watching this closely. Over time, if chatbot language continues to influence human speech, we could see a loss in linguistic diversity, with regional slang, cultural idioms, and natural messiness slowly replaced by clean, universal AI speak.
It’s not hard to imagine a future where people around the world speak with eerily similar vocabulary, shaped less by their culture and more by a model trained on the internet.
It’s already happened before — texting and Twitter shortened our sentences. Now, AI might be making them more structured, more polite, and... a little less human?
The Bottom Line
We’re not just feeding data into AI — we’re learning from it too. Whether that’s good or bad depends on how consciously we respond. For now, if you catch yourself saying “Let’s delve into this topic,” you might want to thank your friendly local chatbot. The age of machine-influenced language is here — and it’s speaking through us.
