Unfortunately, linguistic parasites are not always indicative of AI. They normally begin among us, as human beings, trying to impress people by using the kinds of diction that others in our "in-group" expect of us, whether academic, corporate, journalistic, or political. AI systems only pick these linguistic parasites up from us, as these systems scan our texts.

What is a linguistic parasite? I define it as a word which becomes a cliche through overuse, but that's not all. To qualify as a linguistic parasite, that cliche has to be less precise or apt than any possible substitute, so that their net effect is to subtract from the sum total of human knowledge and insight, each time they are used, as if, like mosquitoes, they were sucking diversity and nuance out of our language. I could list dozens of such linguistic parasites, but here are a few that have become deeply ingrained in our public and academic discourse:

1. Positive and Negative. These are algebraic expressions, misapplied to real life. While they have very precise meanings in mathematics--referring, respectively, to the right and left sides of the number line, they are inherently ambiguous when used in any other context. Does "positive" mean "good" or "happy"? Does "negative" mean "bad" or "critical"?

2. Impact. This is, by far, the worst linguistic parasite. Originally, it was the participial form of the Latin verb "impingo" meaning to hit or strike something physically (and we have a perfectly respectable verb--"impinge (upon)" for that). But in moder English, "Impact" is no longer just a noun, but also an all-purpose verb ("That really impacted me," an adjective ("impactful"). And it displaces a whole array of much more precise and apt nouns and verbs alike. So its net effect has been, as I said, to "suck" diversity and complexity out of our shared discourse, making us all duller and more simplistic...