And as people increasingly turn to\u00a0AI-powered chatbots\u00a0in their everyday lives, experts\u00a0suggest\u00a0they’re mimicking the language chatbots tend to\u00a0use. Some worry this is creating a feedback loop that could\u00a0shrink human creativity and potentially alter our thought processes.<\/p>\n
“I do worry about the homogenization of language being the canary in the coal mine for the homogenization of thought, to where AI starts to really influence not just what we say, but how we think,” said\u00a0Canadian futurist Sinead Bovell, who founded\u00a0the\u00a0tech education company WAYE that\u00a0advises organizations on emerging technologies.<\/p>\n
She says\u00a0more than half of text online is now likely generated in full or in part by AI.<\/p>\n
Bovell says she’s noticed\u00a0a uniformity\u00a0in\u00a0the way people write on social media platforms like X and LinkedIn, as well as\u00a0sites like Substack, the blogging and newsletter platform.<\/p>\n
Several experts told CBC News that this\u00a0growing\u00a0homogeneity of language online\u00a0is also making it increasingly difficult to parse what is and isn’t written by humans.<\/p>\n
Bovell says some of the hallmarks of AI writing include symmetrical clauses such as, “It’s not just X, but Y,” words like “moreover,” the use of lists and bullet points, metaphors that often don’t make sense\u00a0and a generally bland, neutral tone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Headshot\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/morteza.jpg\")
Morteza Dehghani, professor of psychology and computer science at University of Southern California and director of the school’s Center for Computational language sciences, studies the homogenization of language online. (Submitted by Morteza Dehghani)AI also\u00a0impacts human thought,\u00a0reasoning<\/p>\n
Morteza Dehghani, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Computational Language Sciences, says his research bolsters his concern about the homogenization of language and thought.<\/p>\n
“We’re losing the variance and perspective that we see in human societies. And this is going to affect our reasoning as well,” Dehghani said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a\u00a0February study<\/a>, Dehghani and a team of USC researchers analyzed language found in Reddit\u00a0posts,\u00a0scientific papers and\u00a0American community newspapers from 2018 to 2025.<\/p>\n They found a spike in AI-generated text in late 2022, which they note corresponded with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.\u00a0They also found a drop in the variance and complexity of written text since that spike.\u00a0<\/p>\n LISTEN | How AI can impact your brain:<\/p>\n The Morning Edition – K-WRecent MIT study shows impact of AI on our brains: Dr. Peter Lin<\/p>\n A recent study from MIT looked at the impact of using AI on brain function. Dr. Peter Lin walks us through what those researchers found.<\/p>\n Dehghani says this indicates that even writers who aren’t directly using\u00a0large\u00a0language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT seem to be\u00a0trying to adapt to the writing structures they see\u00a0in an online\u00a0world increasingly overrun by AI.<\/p>\n “You want to write in the same fashion that your readers are exposed to, or are used to,” he said.\u00a0“We’re just getting into this loop of homogenization.”\u00a0<\/p>\n In a separate paper<\/a> published this month, Dehghani and other\u00a0USC researchers argue that these homogenizing effects of LLMs on writing are carrying\u00a0into human expression and thought, noting\u00a0that the LLMs\u00a0“reflect and reinforce” dominant styles of writing while\u00a0also “marginalizing alternative voices and reasoning strategies.”<\/p>\n Bovell, the futurist, says\u00a0because data used to train AI comes from the internet,\u00a0it tends to reflect\u00a0the loudest and most dominant online voices,\u00a0meaning groups and cultures that are historically marginalized\u00a0typically aren’t used in that\u00a0training data, which adds to the homogenization.<\/p>\n This problem is compounded, she said, by the fact that most AI we use comes from a handful of American companies.<\/p>\n “At the end of the day,” she said, these companies are “building the foundation of the future, and that’s something that we all need to really think about.”<\/p>\n AI\u00a0increasingly training on its own content<\/p>\n John Licato,\u00a0associate professor in Computer Science and Engineering and director of the Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning Lab at the University of South Florida, says\u00a0the amount of AI and bot-generated content we’re consuming is much higher than it’s ever been, and will probably\u00a0continue to increase.<\/p>\n He says that determining the exact level of automated content\u00a0versus human\u00a0content\u00a0is especially hard because humans amplify posts made by social media\u00a0bots,\u00a0and vice versa.<\/p>\n WATCH | Your next job interview could be with AI: Are AI bots the future of job interviews? <\/p>\n Have you done an interview with an AI bot? While the technology is still in its early stages, some say it frees up humans from tedious tasks while others say there are concerns about HR job losses. CBC\u2019s Ashley Fraser unpacks what the process is like. <\/p>\n He says the internet\u00a0has\u00a0reached a point where it could continue to function in an imaginary scenario where humans stopped using it.\u00a0<\/p>\n That leads to\u00a0another problem with machine learning, where generative AI systems trained on their own content produce\u00a0increasingly worse and more biased\u00a0results. This is something Licato says is already happening.<\/p>\n “When you have AI\u00a0that’s continually trained on its own data, things like biases get worse after multiple generations. Mistakes get worse after every generation,” he said.\u00a0“That is the kind of thing that we would expect to happen if humans just dropped off the internet.”<\/p>\n The push to preserve diversity<\/p>\n Those who study AI and language suggest there’s still a lot to learn about this homogeneity and how to address it.<\/p>\n In the USC paper published in August,\u00a0the researchers concluded\u00a0that “preserving and enhancing meaningful human diversity” has to be central to the\u00a0design and development of\u00a0AI.\u00a0If we don’t pay deliberate attention to that diversity, they warn,\u00a0we won’t be able to\u00a0harness the\u00a0full potential of the technology “without\u00a0sacrificing the very diversity that defines human society.”<\/p>\n To push back against homogenization in LLMs and make them work in the public interest, Bovell says\u00a0we have to figure out how to mould data in a way that’s more diverse, something that’s not always a priority for private companies.<\/p>\n It’s also important to have open-source models that allow anyone to modify them, Bovell says,\u00a0as opposed to proprietary models like ChatGPT that don’t make code and other details available to the public. She’s encouraged that\u00a0countries like Sweden<\/a> have begun working on\u00a0“sovereign AI<\/a>” models to reflect their local cultures.<\/p>\n Bovell\u00a0says that if AI\u00a0is going to\u00a0impact and shape\u00a0languages that are\u00a0the shared fabric allowing society to reach consensus and move forward,\u00a0“you want to make sure that these tools are reflective of the people in your population and the breadth and depth of the diversity there.”<\/p>\n LISTEN | The decline of the internet:<\/p>\n Front BurnerThe internet sucks now, and it happened on purpose<\/p>\n It’s not you \u2014 the internet really does suck. Novelist, blogger and noted internet commentator Cory Doctorow explains what happened to the internet and why you’re tormented by ads, bots, algorithms, AI slop and so many pop-ups. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t an accident.![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/sinead-bovell.jpg\")
Futurist Sinead Bovell says that as AI use has grown, she’s\u00a0noticed\u00a0a uniformity in the way people write on various online platforms. (Submitted by Sinead Bovell)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1755085211_653_default.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nIn Understood: Who Broke the Internet, Doctorow gets into the decisions made by powerful people that got us here, and most importantly, how we fix it. More episodes of Who Broke the Internet are available at:\u00a0https:\/\/link.mgln.ai\/DkvHgc [https:\/\/link.mgln.ai\/DkvHgc]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As AI\u00a0saturates the internet, researchers say it’s\u00a0changing the way we write \u2014\u00a0and, potentially, the way we think. A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-66391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}