Can Grammarly and ChatGPT accelerate language change? AI-powered technologies and their impact on the English language: wordiness vs. conciseness

TL;DR

This paper examines how AI tools like Grammarly and ChatGPT influence English language evolution, especially in promoting conciseness over verbosity, by analyzing their recommendations on sentence structure.

Contribution

It provides a case study showing that AI-powered language tools can both reflect and potentially accelerate language change towards conciseness.

Findings

Both tools recommend shorter, more concise structures.

AI tools suggest improvements even for correct, native speaker sentences.

Technologies like Grammarly may facilitate language change.

Abstract

The proliferation of NLP-powered language technologies, AI-based natural language generation models, and English as a mainstream means of communication among both native and non-native speakers make the output of AI-powered tools especially intriguing to linguists. This paper investigates how Grammarly and ChatGPT affect the English language regarding wordiness vs. conciseness. A case study focusing on the purpose subordinator in order to is presented to illustrate the way in which Grammarly and ChatGPT recommend shorter grammatical structures instead of longer and more elaborate ones. Although the analysed sentences were produced by native speakers, are perfectly correct, and were extracted from a language corpus of contemporary English, both Grammarly and ChatGPT suggest more conciseness and less verbosity, even for relatively short sentences. The present article argues that technologies such as Grammarly not only mirror language change but also have the potential to facilitate or accelerate it.