Locating the Intersection of Generative Artificial Intelligence and Human English Writing Skills: A Comparative Study

This paper offers a multi-dimensional comparative analysis of the linguistic characteristics found in the introduction sections of dissertations produced by ChatGPT and those written by Saudi authors. This research paper aims to analyze the linguistic variation in the introduction part of the dissertations written by Saudi writers compared with the introduction produced by ChatGPT. An extensive analysis of more than 150 linguistic features, including lexico-grammatical structures and semantic nuances, is performed using Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) tagger. A corpus of dissertation introductions written by Saudi students is compiled and analyzed. Furthermore, a corpus is created that comprises introductions produced by ChatGPT. The study investigates the relationship between language produced by AI and human-written content, revealing unique linguistic preferences. The results indicate ChatGPT is more informational, explicit and less non-narrative and non-argumentative than human-written introductions. There is a significant difference in discourse production on dimension five, as human-written introductions produce abstract and ChatGPT produces non-abstract discourse. The study is significant as it highlights the linguistic differences between the writing styles of ChatGPT and Saudi writers, indicating potential areas of improvement for AI-generated texts.