Is AI learning from my writing or am I learning from AI writing?

 

Our writing is heavily influenced by what we're reading. We’ve always absorbed language from whatever we consume: 

• Read enough good writers and your sentences sharpen up. 
• Hang around surfers and suddenly everything is “gnarly.” 
• Spend six months on LinkedIn and your brain starts formatting thoughts into bullet points.

So, of course, reading enough AI-generated text has its impact, too.

Many people now spend their workday marinating in AI-assisted writing without really noticing it. Emails. Reports. Slack messages. Blog posts. Meeting summaries. Half the internet suddenly sounds like it graduated from the same customer service academy.

Consider the word delve which use to live primarily in fantasy novels and TED Talks. Now it’s everywhere, along with meticulous, comprehend, robust, and all the other strangely polished vocabulary that AI models love to spray around like scented disinfectant.

And it's not just impacting our writing. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute studied hundreds of thousands of hours of podcasts and YouTube videos and found that words generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude tend to favor are showing up more in human speech too. 

This feels both fascinating and dystopian.

Obviously, nobody wants to sound like AI ... but I’m not sure people realize how hard that’s becoming when AI writing is increasingly the majority of what we read.

It's a predictable loop: AI learned from us. Now we’re learning from AI. It’s like photocopying a photocopy until the edges blur.

The words don't really bother me. I understand that language changes. It always does. But the flattening is concerning.

Everything starts sounding optimized. Smoothed out. Sanded down until there’s no splinters left. Human writing has personality. Odd rhythms. Unnecessary detours. Now everybody communicates like they’re trying to pass a brand safety review.

Maybe this is just what happens when language gets filtered through machines built to avoid risk and maximize clarity. But clarity alone is overrated. So is polish. A lot of memorable writing is memorable because it limps a little.

Anyway. I’m trying to resist becoming a statistically probable sentence generator myself.

Though apparently I should stop saying “apparently.” AI loves that one too.