Economist Paul Novosad: AI-generated jargon is seeping into economics papers and everyday speech

Economist Paul Novosad offered an observation on August 25 about AI's influence on language: AI-generated text favors jargon and even invents new words, and this phenomenon has already shown up in new working papers in economics, featuring "new economics terms" that never existed before.

Confirmed

Novosad has observed AI-coined new vocabulary appearing in new economics working papers; he believes this improves precision at the cost of readability for some readers
He argues that as people interact more with AI, these terms will become part of their everyday vocabulary and mental shorthand, and will carry over into human-to-human communication

Reasoning

Novosad speculates that AI's pursuit of Token efficiency will in turn shape everyday human speech: redundant or vague words will become rarer, while precise jargon spreads
He sees this as potentially a feature rather than a bug: people can spend more time building core structures instead of getting bogged down in pointless disputes over details
He also cautions that those unfamiliar with these terms may struggle to participate in conversations, that jargon use carries potential risks (footguns), and that its costs need to be taken seriously

Why it matters

This is a verifiable linguistic externality of AI's large-scale entry into academic writing: if coined terminology keeps entering working papers, both the barriers to academic communication and peer-review norms could be affected; at the everyday level, the migration of human-AI interaction habits into human communication suggests AI could become a new force shaping the evolution of human language.

2026-08-25 ~ 2026-08-25 · 5 related posts

Primary sources

Economist observes AI's tendency to invent jargon, sacrificing readability — paulnovosad · 2026-08-25 05:51 (UTC+08:00)
AI-invented jargon is showing up in new economics working papers — paulnovosad · 2026-08-25 05:53 (UTC+08:00)

[source] Economist observes AI's tendency to invent jargon, sacrificing readability — paulnovosad · 2026-08-25
[source] AI-invented jargon is showing up in new economics working papers — paulnovosad · 2026-08-25
Daily language will start integrating AI jargon as usage grows — paulnovosad · 2026-08-25
Opinion: AI's Efficiency Drive Will Reshape Human Language — paulnovosad · 2026-08-25

1 near-duplicate retellings: paulnovosad