India, June 27 -- Have you noticed people around you suddenly dropping words like "meticulous," "adept," or "delve" in everyday conversations? Maybe your college buddy or that uncle who loves TED Talks has started talking about "exploring new realms" or "becoming more adept" at something. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. There's a good chance they've been spending time with AI chatbots, and it's starting to show.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have picked up on this trend. They dug into over 280,000 academic YouTube videos and found that, ever since ChatGPT became popular, people are using certain words much more often - words that pop up a lot in AI-generated text. These aren't scripts written by...