AI, be less ‘stereotypical’: ChatGPT’s speech is conventional but never unique

Vittorio Tantucci; Carlotta Sparvoli

doi:10.1515/ip-2025-2003

Article

AI, be less ‘stereotypical’: ChatGPT’s speech is conventional but never unique

Vittorio Tantucci
Vittorio Tantucci is Senior Lecturer of Linguistics and Chinese Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK, Editorial Board Meber of Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. His publications focus on usage-based intersections of interactional pragmatics, computational and cognitive linguistics. His recent and forthcoming books include Language and Social Minds: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Intersubjectivity (CUP, 2021); Different Slants on Grammaticalization (Benjamins, 2023; co-edited with Sylvie Hancil) and Language and (Creative) Imitation: Dialogic resonance in Pragmatics and Grammar (CUP, forthcoming).
and Carlotta Sparvoli
Carlotta Sparvoli is Associate Professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and previously held positions at the University of Bologna and University College Cork (Ireland), where she directed the MA in TCSOL. Her research focuses on modality and the acquisition and teaching of L2 Chinese. She has authored numerous papers on the expression of modality in both modern and Classical Chinese and has served on the Executive Boards of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL) and the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL), as well as President of the Italian Association (AILC).

Published/Copyright: August 4, 2025

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From the journal Intercultural Pragmatics Volume 22 Issue 2

Abstract

Can AI reproduce human interaction? It can, but only stereotypically. While it can simulate (and even exaggerate) dialogic engagement, its lexicon is less diverse, and the speech acts it realizes are more repetitive and less varied (we took directives as an example). Most importantly, AI struggles to represent ‘conversational uniqueness’, that is ways to interact that define the specificity of a particular conversation and are not entirely conventional. We discovered this after analyzing dialogic resonance (the re-use of an interlocutor’s construction), recombinant creativity (the creative reformulation of an interlocutor’s construction), relevance acknowledgement (the acknowledgement of what an interlocutor said) and other variables from a sampled section of the CallHome Corpus of Chinese telephone conversations. After feeding ChatGPT with speakers’ demographics and contextual information, we asked it to reproduce telephone interactions among Chinese family members. We then fitted a conditional mixed effects Bayesian regression comparing the two datasets. We found that AI over-generalizes human dialogue. It provides a stereotypical way of conversing but shows scarce flexibility in including ‘atypical’ and unconventional utterances, which are, in turn, constitutive of human interactions that occur in real life.

Keywords: AI interaction; human interaction; dialogic resonance; directives; recombinant creativity

Corresponding author: Carlotta Sparvoli, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy, E-mail: carlotta.sparvoli@unive.it

Vittorio Tantucci and Carlotta Sparvoli contributed equally to this work.

About the authors

Vittorio Tantucci

Vittorio Tantucci is Senior Lecturer of Linguistics and Chinese Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK, Editorial Board Meber of Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. His publications focus on usage-based intersections of interactional pragmatics, computational and cognitive linguistics. His recent and forthcoming books include Language and Social Minds: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Intersubjectivity (CUP, 2021); Different Slants on Grammaticalization (Benjamins, 2023; co-edited with Sylvie Hancil) and Language and (Creative) Imitation: Dialogic resonance in Pragmatics and Grammar (CUP, forthcoming).

Carlotta Sparvoli

Carlotta Sparvoli is Associate Professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and previously held positions at the University of Bologna and University College Cork (Ireland), where she directed the MA in TCSOL. Her research focuses on modality and the acquisition and teaching of L2 Chinese. She has authored numerous papers on the expression of modality in both modern and Classical Chinese and has served on the Executive Boards of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL) and the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL), as well as President of the Italian Association (AILC).

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Published Online: 2025-08-04

Published in Print: 2025-04-28

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Keywords for this article

AI interaction; human interaction; dialogic resonance; directives; recombinant creativity