The Great Language Flattening

In at least one crucial way, AI has already won its campaign for global dominance. An unbelievable volume of synthetic prose is published every moment of every day--heaping piles of machine-written news articles, text messages, emails, search results, customer-service chats, even scientific research. Chatbots learned from human writing. Now the influence may run in the other direction. Some people have hypothesized that the proliferation of generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT will seep into human communication, that the terse language we use when prompting a chatbot may lead us to dispose of any niceties or writerly flourishes when corresponding with friends and colleagues.