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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten.

Today in the podcast, the annoying words large language models overuse.

And what that means for how we talk.

It's like someone pulled a switch and here's Delve.

Here's intricate.

You know how when you read something, you can sometimes get a picture of the person who wrote it.

Like if I start talking about touching base to synergize

after we circle back, first of all, please call for an intervention. But second of all,

you might reasonably suspect that someone from the East Week got a hold of the script.

Or if I talk about giving 110% or winners don't quit, you might clock me as a sports person.

Well, in recent years, people started noticing that AI chatbots, large language models,

had their own linguistic tells. Certain words that seem to crop up a lot more often in AI

sentences than in human English.

Words like delve and realm.

And it wasn't subtle.

It was a big sudden shift in word usage.

Joining me now to talk about that are two researchers who decided to delve into the realm of AI linguistics.

Tom Uzek is an assistant professor of computational linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics.

And Zina Ward is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, both at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Hello to you both. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, thanks for having us.

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