Yep. And it's happening faster than I thought.
Of course, I'm talking about AI - because nowadays, there's nothing else to talk about. More specifically, I'm talking about the side effect of using AI every day for every thing. All writing is starting to sound the same.
Over the past couple months, I've been writing supplemental essays for my college applications. I noticed a pattern, while it is my writing, I'm finding it hard to see it that way. See, because I interact with AI almost every day for things like coding or school, it began to influence my language; I often find myself talking and writing like AI.
This is bad. Like, really bad. What I once saw as a tool, a quality of life addition, has now replaced my personal voice.
Class
English is one of my favorite subjects at school, it's the one subject where there are no formulas, there are no rules, it's the one subject where I can let my mind roam free. Others? Not so much. For some, it's the one subject where you can ChatGPT yourself to an A+. As someone who likes finding shortcuts, I strongly dislike and avoid the use of AI in English class, because it's the only subject where I'm allowed to use my personal voice - why waste the opportunity?
Even when I don't use AI in class, my use of AI elsewhere has - as mentioned earlier - influenced my writing. Even when I don't use it, I have that same robotic tone that sounds like everyone else. It disgusts me, the subject I loved because I could use my personal voice was no longer that because I lost that voice.
I noticed this when I read an essay my classmate wrote and it sounded weirdly similar to what I wrote. I know they used AI, but I also knew I did not. In a small 'eureka' moment, I went around reading other essays and found that they all sound the same. Every. Single. One. It was "delve," and "It's not this, it's that." So boring.
Poker Face
I recently had the chance to read and edit my friends' college essays. They always claim the work is 100% their own, no AI use at all. One sentence in, however, and I can tell that this work is not, in fact, their own. It appears that as a result of my efforts to avoid sounding like AI, I'm able to tell AI writing from non-AI writing. Maybe it's not just me, I'm not some kind of human AI detecting superhero, but it fascinates me how good we are at recognizing patterns without even trying.
Putting aside the fact that they're missing the point of a personal essay, they refuse to admit they used AI. "I write like AI," they say as an excuse, but it just doesn't work. While yes, it is very hypocritical of me to say this given that just some time ago I wrote that everyone is starting to sound like AI, I may need to clarify my position: humans write kind of like AI, not entirely. AI writes in such a distinct, exaggerated way that anyone looking can tell that a human did not write this, unless they were a very vague, overly dramatic human.
If you ask an AI to write like a human for a personal essay, it has this weird tendency to use manufactured tension in writing that's meant to imitate a human or tell a story. It comes in the form of these "micro-sentences" where it tries to create suspense and emphasis but it always lands as forced and unsatisfying to the reader. What makes it obvious isn't that it's there, - it's a common technique - what makes it obvious is that it's used everywhere, and it uses this forced suspense as an excuse to omit information. It's almost like you didn't add enough detail in the prompt...