Fastcompany iconFastcompanySep 1, 2026 ~1 min source read

AI is making us sound the same—and killing our personal expression

More than a third of all internet web pages published since ChatGPT's November 2022 launch were authored by AI, according to the Pew Research Center. A new paper in Nature Human Behavior finds that LLMs can push people's writing toward a narrower set of linguistic norms, reducing stylistic diversity and obscuring some of the identity signals embedded in our words.

AI is making us sound the same—and killing our personal expression

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More than a third of all internet web pages published since ChatGPT's November 2022 launch were authored by AI, according to the Pew Research Center.

"We were kind of asking, what would actually happen when everyone's text is going through the same models?" Sourati says.

A new paper in Nature Human Behavior finds that LLMs can push people's writing toward a narrower set of linguistic norms, reducing stylistic diversity and obscuring some of the identity signals embedded in...

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More than a third of all internet web pages published since ChatGPT's November 2022 launch were authored by AI, according to the Pew Research Center. A new paper in Nature Human Behavior finds that LLMs can push people's writing toward a narrower set of linguistic norms, reducing stylistic diversity and obscuring some of the identity signals embedded in our words. Us, James Pennebaker's book that explored how people's personal values, backgrounds, and beliefs can lead them to communicate the same ideas using different words.

How it works

  • What are the implications?" So, he set to work to find out.
  • At the same time, LLMs were becoming more popular, and Sourati began to wonder whether the tech might reduce that linguistic diversity.
  • "We were kind of asking, what would actually happen when everyone's text is going through the same models?" Sourati says.
  • "If you have this layer on top of everyone's text, would you change any of these artifacts that we know about people's texts?

Details worth keeping

That flood of language may also be changing the way humans write. First, Sourati conducted a time-series analysis usi...

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