Overview
- Max Planck Institute researchers tracked the frequency of “GPT words” like delve, meticulous and realm in more than 360,000 YouTube videos and 771,000 podcast episodes since ChatGPT’s launch in 2022.
- They defined “GPT words” by feeding emails, essays and academic papers into specific ChatGPT models and extracting the AI’s most favored terms.
- The research highlights a bidirectional cultural feedback loop in which AI-driven language patterns are flowing back into human communication.
- Authors warn that widespread adoption of AI-preferred vocabulary could accelerate linguistic homogenization and erode cultural diversity.
- As a non-peer-reviewed preprint on arXiv, the study awaits validation and prompts calls for broader analysis of AI’s influence beyond academic speech sources.