Empirical evidence of Large Language Model's influence on human spoken communication

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents now interact with billions of humans in natural language, thanks to advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. This raises the question of whether AI has the potential to shape a fundamental aspect of human culture: the way we speak. Recent analyses revealed that scientific publications already exhibit evidence of AI-specific language. But this evidence is inconclusive, since scientists may simply be using AI to copy-edit their writing. To explore whether AI has influenced human spoken communication, we transcribed and analyzed about 280,000 English-language videos of presentations, talks, and speeches from more than 20,000 YouTube channels of academic institutions. We find a significant shift in the trend of word usage specific to words distinctively associated with ChatGPT following its release. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that humans increasingly imitate LLMs in their spoken language. Our results raise societal and policy-relevant concerns about the potential of AI to unintentionally reduce linguistic diversity, or to be deliberately misused for mass manipulation. They also highlight the need for further investigation into the feedback loops between machine behavior and human culture.

Supporting stylists by recommending fashion style

Outfittery is an online personalized styling service targeted at men. We have hundreds of stylists who create thousands of bespoke outfits for our customers every day. A critical challenge faced by our stylists when creating these outfits is selecting an appropriate item of clothing that makes sense in the context of the outfit being created, otherwise known as style fit. Another significant challenge is knowing if the item is relevant to the customer based on their tastes, physical attributes and price sensitivity. At Outfittery we leverage machine learning extensively and combine it with human domain expertise to tackle these challenges. We do this by surfacing relevant items of clothing during the outfit building process based on what our stylist is doing and what the preferences of our customer are. In this paper we describe one way in which we help our stylists to tackle style fit for a particular item of clothing and its relevance to an outfit. A thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation highlights the method's ability to recommend fashion items by style fit.