Against All AI Authority Except my Mom

So this is interesting.

Per this article at Futurism.com, teachers, researchers, and other professionals have started to notice certain writing styles popping up from ChatGPT, and likely from other large language models.

Thing is, I'm not sure I see these patterns as horrendous as reported -- certainly not use of the em dash, which I use a lot in my own writing.

From the article:

"As AI-generated text is becoming increasingly ubiquitous on the internet, some distinctive linguistic patterns are starting to emerge — maybe more so than anything else, that pattern of negating statements typified by "it's not X, it's Y."

"Once you notice it, you start to see it everywhere. One teacher on Reddit even noticed that certain AI phrase structures are making the jump into spoken language."

Pay particular to the italicized sentence (emphasis mine). It's an enormous red flag not that LLMs are corrupting the language, but that programs used to detect it are going to be outpaced as common spoken (and, yes, written) language evolves thanks to these artificial intelligence structures. Like it or not, we are going to lose the battle against AI in the written, and likely spoken word.

Do we give up?

No. But we can certainly point things out. But not in a rude way, because right now even my students whom I'm confident aren't using AI (or at least all that much AI) to write and churning out essays that sound like they always do, per author Terry Pratchett's description of newspaper language in his Discworld novels: As if the writers "have their bums stuffed with tweed."

I'm going to focus less on hunting out AI and focus a lot more on praise for students who turn their own phrases, who take risks, even if they end up taking them down blind alleys, because these are the students who really want to learn how to write or communicate. Those who want the easy way out through AI are going to take it, and technology is going to make that increasinly hard for us to detect. But that ought to help make the original, awkward, bumbling human-sourced writing stand out more. Those are the students I want to help.