Isolation Effect

​Read online​

---

This viral paper on AI revealed something I've presumed but never had evidence for.

AI makes us all sound the same.
​
The authors collected 318,490 stories on Reddit's r/WritingPrompts from January 2018 to November 2024¹. ​
​
They only analysed posts over 200 words.
​
They measured how unique the posts were over time, and the results are fairly shocking.

2018, 2019, 2020, 2021: All posts contain a unique writing style.
​
2022, 2023: Writing styles started to converge.
​
2024: Variance in writing style falls off a cliff.

In November 2022, writing across the hit an inflection point. Previously writing styles were unique; since then they've become more and more ubiquitous.
​
And November 2022 is, of course, the date ChatGPT launched.
​
Variance in language has disappeared. We're all sounding the same, and because everything sounds the same, it's harder than ever to stand out.

And we're all sounding the same in an odd way.

The authors note that language has become more complex but complex in a similar style.

​
They don't give examples in the paper, but I imagine the use of AI is making writing less human:

Pre AI: "So yeah, I found the thing in my nan's attic."

Post AI: "The discovery occurred while searching my grandmother's attic."

Pre AI: "We tried a simpler approach and it worked better than we expected."

Post AI: "We propose a streamlined approach that achieves competitive performance."

The Problem

In 1933, German researcher Hedwig Von Restorff² published a paper on memory and distinctiveness.

She gave participants long lists of letter combinations to remember (e.g. JTSW, UCSM, PLST), but among them was a single number sequence: 9125.

When participants returned after a distraction task, Hedwig found that the distinct number combo was far more memorable than any of the letter combinations.

For his 2017 book The Choice Factory, Richard Shotton and colleague Laura Weston³ repeated the experiment with 500 participants.
​
Participants were shown a list of numbers, 15 in black and 1 in blue.
​
Respondents were 30 times more likely to recall the distinctive blue number.

The takeaway is simple.

Things that are distinct are remembered.

Which is exactly why this AI writing style is so harmful.

It makes language less memorable.

From brand slogans to menu descriptions to short stories and website copy.

If you use a homogenous AI language to fill out your text, you'll create text that's forgettable.

In a world saturated with AI-generated copy, real-human written text has never been so valuable.

---

There are almost 600 more insights like this in the Nudge Vaults, including 26 on distinctiveness and the isolation effect.

Get access to the Vaults right now →​

Or you can preview your first 50 insights for free →

---

Cheers,

​Phill​

P.S. No AI was used when writing this email. Look, here's a typo to proof it.