Anne, what a kind, wonderful thing to say. You have made my weekend. Thank you.

Members only so copy/paste . AI is killing the words we love .

'' ‘To plumb the depths of the human condition one must be willing to dig down into the dark places, to delve into the primal and terrifying, to unearth the monstrous and mysterious, and to embrace all of this in its naked glory — such is the tapestry of human existence.’

What do you think of my opener? Far too grandiose? Couldn’t agree more. But more than likely, that’s not all you’re thinking. You’re thinking: ‘Delve?’ ‘Embrace?’ ‘Tapestry?’ these are the calling cards of that boogeyman that has come to shatter the world of writing — artificial intelligence.

You see AI has a thing for certain words and phrases. It likes them a lot. It seems to see them as the sign of good writing, which means they’ve become the sign of bad writing.

Are these words now dead to us forever more? Is this the same for anything that becomes the object of AI’s diabolical attentions? And what does all this mean for writing and writers?

Let us delve in to get the lay of the land.

The objects of its fancy

There’s a lot written about the words and phrases Chat GPT and its ilk have latched on to as their bread and butter. Here’s James Presbitero Jr. on the subject in a highly successful article on Medium.

Here’s a list of 100 of its favourite darlings.

Unless you specifically request otherwise, it gravitates towards a formal tone and moderately sophisticated language. This is probably for the reason that moving away from slap-bang in the center in one direction or another requires sentience. The writer needs to know who they are, who their readers are, and why they’re writing, and these chatbots have been programmed to have some sort of decontextualised everyman denuded of all particular content in mind.

It loves verbs like embrace, elevate, escalate, enrich, foster, catalyse, leverage, harness, and empathise. These words marry simplicity and grace well, and everyone knows them. They also sit at the epicentre of acceptability.

AI is drawn to the letter E for some reason. And I do think there is a certain classic elegance to these verbs. They are not sharp, jagged, or aggressive; rather, they have a water-like fluid quality to them. These generative chatbots seem to have understood that simple elegance is the essence of accomplished writing. A solid aspiration for any writer, I would say.

For some reason, it has decided that the motif of cloth and fabric holds an especial magic. Words like tapestry, weave, entwine, interwoven, and unravel appear again and again in AI-generated texts.

When overdone, such language is heavy handed and endlessly tedious. But there’s also a reason the metaphor transcends any particular language and has a universal appeal across many if not all tongues. It simply makes a whole lot of sense for a species that makes connections between everything around it to use words that demonstrate this connectedness.

AI in its many guises employs linking words and phrases at a high frequency— furthermore, in conclusion, consequently, hence, notwithstanding. These words function like signposting which allow the reader to negotiate what’s being said and let them see how it all fits together. They are essential when trying to explain something that is a little tricky to explain and a little hard to understand.

The problem is that when you overuse them or use them in the wrong context, you sound like a surgeon slicing up the world to present pieces of it to your audience, much like a robot, wherein lies the large fly in the ointment.

Our chatty friend has a thing for adverbs of degree, intensifiers and qualifiers too; things like extremely, notably, particularly, seamlessly (the cloth metaphor once again).

And for whatever mad reason on God’s green earth, its most ‘favouritest’ of favourites, its ‘darlingest’ of darlings is ‘delve’.

Are these words now dead and buried?

Are all these wonderful words fated to live out the rest of their days on the linguistic dustbin, like anon, codpiece and doubloon? No, definitely not. Most words will be more or less fine. I’ll explain.

The cardinal sin our prose-penning Pinocchio commits is one of context and volume. AI uses words in the wrong context and in the wrong amounts.

This may in fact have a positive effect. It will force writers to think a little more on their choices — what they say, what they don’t say and whether to omit or include this or that. Anything that encourages greater reflection and refinement is a good thing nine times out of ten.

Some particles of language are too fundamental to do away with as well: they are too big to fail.

This is true for what we may call structural load-bearing language — linking words and phrases, conditionals and standard constructions. This is also true for what we may loosely call modifying words— particularly, very, a little, somewhat, exceptionally intelligent, grossly unfair, arguably.

You simply cannot write English without these — they are the skeleton which holds up the whole operation.

Alas, this is not so with all words. It may be far harder to resurrect specific verbs, adjectives and set phrases; things that flesh out one’s work but are ultimately decorative when all’s said and done. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

I asked Chat GPT to write a 100-word text on why change can be a positive thing. I said nothing about tone or register. Here’s what it came up with:

This is close to flawless technically speaking. As an English teacher, I can tell you that this sort of essay would get very high marks in IELTS or TOEFL.

But look at all its ‘favourite darlings’ represented ever so well— embrace change, foster resilience, discover strengths, limit progress, evolve. Sadly, I am not sure we can bring ‘embrace’, ‘foster’, ‘seamlessly’, ‘tapestry’, and ‘delve’ back to life any time soon. I will think more than twice about when and where I include them in my writing until AI outgrows them.

And this brings us to negatives of all this.

What does this mean for us as writers?

I foresee a race to the bottom and to the top. The AI-chatbot stomping grounds are slap-bang in the linguistic centre, where it is laying waste to every middlebrow sacred cow in sight. It doesn’t go for the really fancy, the really weird or the really simple. It lives in a world where neither Bukowski nor Nabokov ever existed.

So, depending on who you are and who you want to be, you’ll dig yourself a nice deep hole or you’ll become a mountaineer.

We also, as discussed above, need to become more careful in our choice of word and our use of language to chart the best possible course.

But what happens when AI starts to freely use ken and vim and verve and zeal?

What about contemplate, ruminate, decimate and deracinate?

And cool phrasal verbs like wolf down, weasel out of, pan out and take the piss out of?

What about idiomatic language like: on the fly, over the moon, away with the fairies and under the weather?

What happens if it starts to use slang? What happens if it starts to curse and swear?

This may mean the death of the cliché, but likewise the death of the collocation, the standard phrase and the age-old adage. It won’t of course, I am exaggerating, but it will signal a sea change which is going to make the creation and consumption of writing very different to what it was before.

Good writing will mean negotiating the waters of how it writes and how we write. And the waters will rise with time and the seas will grow more treacherous. Writing and reading will be an endless game of cat and mouse, simultaneously seeking out and staying clear of the wiles of our artificial friend. AI will be the spectre haunting every artform and mode of creation as a pure ever-present possibility, never truly absent for we now know the Devil is very real and happens to be able to write well.

In an odd paradox, we will only need to worry about artificial intelligence until it becomes as good as us. Once AI chatbots are able to write as well as good and even great writers, there will be no more game of cat and mouse and no more spectre. It will learn style. It may develop a voice. Perhaps it will learn how to be flawed in the right away, to be human. It will just be one of us, only better than most of us, and no one will be able to tell. And this will raise a whole new set of far scarier questions.

Thanks Anne for bringing this up . Previously we have discussed the lack of reading in the populace and the dumbing down of the public . AI is now a new challenge . It will kill writing and transfer of knowledge to the future .

https://medium.com/@kb262002/impact-of-artificial-intelligence-on-writing-6cd16e0ce054