Abstract
From the printing press to social media, innovations in communication technology have repeatedly reshaped how ideas spread through human culture. Chatbots powered by generative artificial intelligence constitute a new medium, encoding cultural patterns in their neural representations and disseminating them in conversations with hundreds of millions of people. A fundamental question arises: do these patterns transmit into human language, ultimately shaping human culture? While fully quantifying the causal impact of a chatbot like ChatGPT on human culture is challenging, lexical shifts in human spoken communication may offer an early indicator.
Here we show that words preferentially generated by ChatGPT, such as 'delve', 'showcase', 'boast', 'intricacies', and 'meticulous', increased abruptly in spontaneous human speech. A synthetic-control analysis of 737,083 hours of conversation from 824,634 podcast episodes, screened for unscripted speech, causally links this shift to ChatGPT's release. The measurable influence on spontaneous speech suggests that humans internalize the lexical choices of large language models (LLMs). A preregistered experiment (N = 496) confirms this, as a brief chatbot interaction led participants to adopt its words as their own, persisting past a distractor task and confirmed in forced lexical choice, indicating entrenchment in the active vocabulary.
Together, these results show that machines trained on human data now feed their own traits back into human language, integrating LLMs into the ongoing processes of cultural evolution. This coupling raises concerns about linguistic homogenization and the capacity of a few major AI providers for latent cultural influence at scale.
Blogger's Review: This article reveals the potential of large language models to influence human language and culture, emphasizing the complex relationship between technological advancement and human communication. As AI continues to evolve, we must be vigilant about its potential threats to linguistic diversity and cultural heritage.