Worth Reading – AI is making journalistic language more repetitive and predictable – and it’s a problem for all of us
This is interesting to think about as we all start noticing the sameness of online content in the Gen AI age.
In addition, writing is also becoming more repetitive and homogenised. It repeats syntactic structures, and tends towards a neutral tone, formulaic expressions, and predictable paragraph structures. This is especially important in journalism because the press does not just exist to broadcast information – it also mediates between specialised and more accessible registers, decides where to place emphasis, translates vocabulary, and teaches forms of expression.
When public language becomes too uniform, it limits journalism’s ability to fine tune writing in response to new information.
I don’t remember how old I was when I realized how much influence what I read as a kid and into adulthood had on how I spoke in day-to-day life, let alone in front of an audience. I won’t claim to be extremely well-read, but I know that I pick up phrases and ways of speaking from a variety of sources, written and spoken-word.
Could we enter an era in which AI writes so much of what we read and what people say that we all start to sound exactly the same?
That would be sad, but it’s clearly where the internet seems to be headed.
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