"Genlangs" and Zipf's Law: Do languages generated by ChatGPT statistically look human?
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Abstract (arXiv)
OpenAI's GPT-4 is a Large Language Model (LLM) that can generate coherent constructed languages, or "conlangs," which we propose be called "genlangs" when generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The genlangs created by ChatGPT for this research (Voxphera, Vivenzia, and Lumivoxa) each have unique features, appear facially coherent, and plausibly "translate" into English. This study investigates whether genlangs created by ChatGPT follow Zipf's law. Zipf's law approximately holds across all natural and artificially constructed human languages. According to Zipf's law, the word frequencies in a text corpus are inversely proportional to their rank in the frequency table. This means that the most frequent word appears about twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, and so on. We hypothesize that Zipf's law will hold for genlangs because (1) genlangs created by ChatGPT fundamentally operate in the same way as human language with respect to the semantic usefulness of certain tokens, and (2) ChatGPT has been trained on a corpora of text that includes many different languages, all of which exhibit Zipf's law to varying degrees. Through statistical linguistics, we aim to understand if LLM-based languages statistically look human. Our findings indicate that genlangs adhere closely to Zipf's law, supporting the hypothesis that genlangs created by ChatGPT exhibit similar statistical properties to natural and artificial human languages. We also conclude that with human assistance, AI is already capable of creating the world's first fully-functional genlang, and we call for its development.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 0 of its 1 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2023.
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 0; 2025: 1; 2026: 2.
4 papers.
- 2023Playing with words: Comparing the vocabulary and lexical diversity of ChatGPT and humanscited by 8
- 2025How Large Language Models Are Changing MOOC Essay Answers: A Comparison of Pre- and Post-LLM Responsescited by 5
- 2026The Moltbook Files: A Harmless Slopocalypse or Humanity's Last Experimentcited by 1
- 2026LLMs are not stochastic parrots: Evidence for meaning-mediated abstraction from conlang-like taskscited by 1
- 2026LLMs are not stochastic parrots: Evidence for meaning-mediated abstraction from conlang-like tasks28 Sep 2026
- 2026The Moltbook Files: A Harmless Slopocalypse or Humanity's Last Experiment8 May 2026
- 2025How Large Language Models Are Changing MOOC Essay Answers: A Comparison of Pre- and Post-LLM Responses17 Apr 2025
- 2023Playing with words: Comparing the vocabulary and lexical diversity of ChatGPT and humans14 Aug 2023