<scp>AI</scp> and language change: The case of the hallucinating spellchecker

Key points The formal written register of the English language is subject to change from AI enhanced spellchecking, grammar and style tools. The proprietary AI algorithms are poorly understood and under‐researched. There is potential for cultural biases, unclear memorisation predictors and variability in reproducibility leading to poorly written and grammatically incorrect English. There is room for further study, most likely in an interdisciplinary setting involving linguists and computer scientists, with an attempt to reverse engineer the AI algorithms.