Each AI Chatbot Has Its Own, Distinctive Writing Style

The last time you interacted with ChatGPT, did it feel like you were chatting with one person, or more like you were conversing with multiple individuals? Did the chatbot appear to have a consistent personality, or did it seem different each time you engaged with it?

A few weeks ago, while comparing language proficiency in essays written by ChatGPT with that in essays by human authors, I had an aha ! moment. I realized that I was comparing a single voice—that of the large language model, or LLM, that powers ChatGPT—to a diverse range of voices from multiple writers. Linguists like me know that every person has a distinct way of expressing themselves, depending on their native language, age, gender, education and other factors. We call that individual speaking style an “idiolect.” It is similar in concept to, but much narrower than, a dialect, which is the variety of a language spoken by a community. My insight: one could analyze the language produced by ChatGPT to find out whether it expresses itself in an idiolect—a single, distinct way.

Idiolects are essential in forensic linguistics. This field examines language use in police interviews with suspects, attributes authorship of documents and text messages, traces the linguistic backgrounds of asylum seekers and detects plagiarism, among other activities. While we don’t (yet) need to put LLMs on the stand, a growing group of people, including teachers, worry about such models being used by students to the detriment of their education—for instance, by outsourcing writing assignments to ChatGPT. So I decided to check whether ChatGPT and its artificial intelligence cousins, such as Gemini and Copilot, indeed possess idiolects.

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Each AI Chatbot Has Its Own, Distinctive Writing Style—Just As Humans Do