LSMs accelerated but did not start changes in CHI paper writing
How Did Writing Change At CHI? Analyzing 44 Years of CHI Writing Before and After the Introduction of Large Language Models
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Scientific papers for CHI conferences have changed a lot over decades. The authors studied thousands of papers from 1982 to 2026 to see how writing style evolved, especially after large language models (LLMs) became public. They found that writing did not become uniform or simpler because of LLMs; vocabulary grew more diverse and sentence flow stayed varied. The shift toward denser and harder-to-read writing began before LLMs but sped up after. The authors discuss possible reasons for these writing changes and LLMs' role in accelerating them.
What this means in practice
- •For academic editors: Identify subtle shifts in scientific writing style to tailor editing guidelines for improving paper clarity and accessibility.
- •For conference organizers: Monitor trends in submission writing style to adapt calls for papers and review criteria emphasizing clarity and diversity in prose.
Authors
Thomas Kosch, Robin Welsch, Michael Hedderich, Christopher Katins
Abstract
The availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) reshaped scientific discourse at a linguistic level. LLMs are assumed to homogenize academic writing, flattening it into a single generic lexical register. To understand how CHI writing has changed since the public release of LLMs, we analyzed full texts of 14,262 archival papers across all 44 CHI proceedings from 1982 to 2026, measuring readability, register, lexical diversity, and marker words typically produced by LLMs. We find that prose did not homogenize, while vocabulary grew more varied, and sentence rhythm remained irregular. CHI prose changed more between 2016 and 2026 than in other decades toward greater density, and reading ease has declined since 2022. The word-level shift began before any author used LLMs, so LLMs did not start the change but accelerated it. Reflecting on the history of CHI papers, we discuss what may have caused changes in prose and how LLMs accelerated them.