By Laura Aull
Publication Date: 2026-03-20 12:38:00
Distrust and affection. Concern and excitement. Most people have mixed feelings about AI English, whether they always recognize it or not. When reading AI-generated text, people feel that it sounds fake or wrong. When a person reads English, they are more likely to have the impression that it has a distinctive voice or a personal touch.
What exactly makes English sound human or like AI? And does it matter if AI English never truly conveys a human feel?
I research the institutionalization of English. There is a long, problematic history of people being positive or negative about different types of English, rewarding the way it is spoken or written by some parts of society and devaluing the way it is used by others.
When generative AI language tools came onto the market, they exacerbated these problems. English-based models of major languages are trained using text from the public Internet. Human instructions instruct the models to sound like formal English. For this reason, large language models…
