Excerpt from LSA news article, "Who Wrote This? AI English Versus Human English," by Gina Balibrera
AI writing seems to be everywhere these days—in classrooms, hiring processes, advertising, literary publishing, and news stories. You may have found yourself questioning whether something you’re reading is human writing or the hallucinations of a bot.
Theories—mostly unsubstantiated—persist about the markers of AI writing. For a minute, the use of em dashes was touted as a tell of AI-generated writing, much to the chagrin of Emily Dickinson stans the world over. (For the record: This LSA writer’s affinity for em dashes, as seen in the previous sentence, is 100 percent human-generated.) Overreliance on the “rule of three” has also recently come under scrutiny as a giveaway that a piece of writing was generated by AI. Both of these popular conjectures have been roundly dismissed by linguists.
Laura Aull, LSA professor in English language and literature and in linguistics, says that identifying the distinctions between human and AI writing is more complex than clocking punctuation, grammar, and cadence. (There’s that rule of three—again, this writer is a human.) Here, Aull talks with LSA about what AI English is, and what AI writing means for human literacy.
LSA: What is AI English, and how did it come to be?
Laura Aull: ...AI English is based on what is probable in some English, and AI English patterns favor formal, informational, and native-speaker English. By contrast, human English is based on what is possible in global English, and human English patterns include formal and informal, interpersonal and informational, native speaker and additional language use, all over the world. Put another way: AI English is like a big can of some English, driven by math; human English is a big world of English, driven by all of English’s possibilities and influences.
LSA: Where are you seeing AI writing appearing in places we might expect to see human-generated writing? What’s surprising about the context in which AI writing appears? Are the places where we are finding AI writing changing?
LA: The unsolicited ubiquity of AI tools is what strikes me most. Just the day before writing this, I saw that Google scholar has now embedded an AI-generated “quick read” option linked to the right of most articles. For busy readers (and who isn’t busy?), this can incentivize summary reading versus slower, fuller engagement with research materials, and it is clearly not something either a reader or writer opts into (I didn’t opt into it as a reader, and much of my own work has the quick read option, which I never elected).
Literacy is extremely complex. In a single day, most LSA students will need to read grammatically dense texts with specialized terminology; receive and send text messages that follow intricate sociolinguistic expectations; and produce visual data, calculations, and/or written text that follow post-secondary and disciplinary expectations. Literacy has never been simple, in other words—not before nor since AI. It is slow and iterative, and it is best supported with explicit attention and instruction.
Enter AI, which offers a way out of the frustrating slowness and complexity of literacy development, at least in the short term. What I would say is surprising today, then, is the ubiquity and ease with which a person can use a tool that outsources literacy challenges (and is bad for the environment, to boot).
Read the full article on the LSA News page.
