"After testing six AI models, the researchers found consistent favoritism for words coming from Latin and French over those with Germanic etymologies..."

"... even more than you would typically encounter in the English language. This bias appears rooted in the preference-learning stage, when the models are trained to align with human expectations about language. This process poses an inescapable problem: that you need real people to make sure the machine is aligned, but the human workers are ironically biased as well. As annotators click through sample texts, for example, they are probably subconsciously disposed to approve those that sound confident and incisive. This new finding could help explain why large language models like ChatGPT and Claude seem to have a distinctive writing style. Previous research has found that AI chatbots tend to overuse words like 'meticulous' and 'commendable,' creating a kind of linguistic uncanny valley that sounds similar to how you speak, but ever so slightly off. Perhaps the ghosts of Latin and French haunted these words during preference learning, leading human workers to reward more prestigious-sounding sentences. Of course, the Germanic versus Romance distinction is a simplification of a messier etymological reality. The notoriously overrepresented word 'delve' is actually Old English in origin...."

Writes Adam Aleksic, author of "Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language," in "Do these words make you sound smarter? The bias is spreading. English speakers love the Romance vocabulary. AI noticed" (WaPo).

The "Germanic versus Romance distinction" = "We’ll use more Latin terms when we want to speak formally or authoritatively; we’ll use Germanic words to sound crass or casual." That's how Aleksic puts it.

That made me think about what Jorge Luis Borges said about English: English is a "far finer language than Spanish," and one reason is that "English is both a Germanic and Latin language."

"For any idea, you have 2 words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example, if I say 'regal,' that is not exactly the same thing as saying 'kingly.' Or if I say 'fraternal,' that's not the same thing as saying 'brotherly.' Or 'dark' and 'obscure' — those words are different. It will make all the difference speaking, for example, of a Holy Spirit. It will make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost, since 'ghost' is a fine dark Saxon word, while 'spirit' is light —it's the Latin word...."