AI Took the Doubt Out of the Writing. That's the Problem.

Kimberly Becker joins George and George on the Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks podcast to talk about what our research is revealing about the language AI produces and what it means for the rest of us. 

Topics Covered

• How Kimberly's research compared AI-generated abstracts to human-written ones in nursing journals and what the key linguistic differences were
• Why AI text tends to be informationally dense, formulaic, and stripped of hedging language
• The Porter and Jick letter and how a five-sentence note helped fuel the opioid epidemic through citation chaining
• What happens when AI scales the same kind of telephone game with scientific evidence
• How algorithmic silos and certainty amplification may be eroding our tolerance for nuance
• The difference between accuracy and complexity in writing, and why polished text is not the same as deep thinking
• Why smaller, well-vetted language models may produce better outcomes than massive ones trained on internet slop
• Neil Postman's idea that writing "freezes speech" and what that means in an era when fewer people are doing their own writing

Referenced in This Episode

• Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks podcast
• The Porter and Jick letter (1980) on opioid addiction
• Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
• James Marriott's essay on the post-literate society
• Derek Thompson, "The Decline of Thinking" (The Atlantic)
• OpenAI's Prism research tool