Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics: Online-First Articles

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Could generative AI become a ghostwriter for the US president?

ORCiD logo with link | University of Neuchatel
Published online: 19 September 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24259.sav
Abstract
With ChatGPT, AI generative technology has demonstrated its ability to understand user queries and to write human-like messages. Recently, other large language models (LLMs) have gained significant momentum. Based on this technology, this study analyses the style and rhetoric of three LLMs by comparing the machine-generated speeches to those of recent US presidents. Specifically, it contrasts State of the Union addresses from Reagan to Biden with those produced by the GPT-3.5, GPT-4.0, and DeepSeek-v3 models. This analysis finds that LLM models frequently use the ‘we’ and produce shorter messages with, on average, longer sentences comprised of more complex words. Additionally, the computer-based models adopt a more optimistic tone and more often include terms related to political, symbolic, and abstract categories. Despite mimicking an author’s style, the generated speeches remain distinct from those of the original author. Finally, DeepSeek-v3 shows a closer similarity to those of the real US presidents.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.State of the art
  • 3.Corpus overview
  • 4.Language complexity
  • 5.Stylometric analysis
  • 6.Psychological and emotional analysis
  • 7.Intertextual distance
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (46)
References
Arnold, E., and Labbé, D. 2015. “Vote for me. Don’t vote for the other one.” Journal of World Languages 2 (1): 32–49. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Antoun, W., Mouilleron, V., Sagot, B., and Seddah, D. 2023. “Towards a robust detection of language model-generated text: Is ChatGPT that easy to detect?” CORIA-TALN Conference, Paris June 2023, 1–14. [URL]
Baayen, H. R. 2008. “Analyzing Linguistic Data. A Practical Introduction Using R.” Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., and Conrad, S. 2009. “Register, Genre, and Style.” Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Conover, W. J. 1990. “Practical Nonparametric Statistics.” John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crystal, D. 2019. “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.” 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., and Courville, A. 2016. “Deep Learning.” Boston: The MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grimmer, J., and Stewart, B. M. 2013. “Text as data: the promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts.” Political Analysis 21 (3): 267–297. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guo, B., Zhang, X., Wang, Z., Jiang, M., Nie, J., Ding, Y., Yue, J., and Wu, Y. 2023. “How close if ChatGPT to human experts? Comparison corpus, evaluation and detection.” Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, Z. 1954. “Distributional structure.” Word 10 (23): 146–162. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hart, R. P. 1984. “Verbal Style and the Presidency. A Computer-based Analysis.” Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hart, R. P., Childers, J. P., and Lind, C. J. 2013. “Political Tone. How Leaders Talk and Why.” The University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hart, R. P. 2020. “Trump and Us. What He Says and Why People Listen.” Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2023. “American Eloquence: Language and Leadership in the Twentieth Century.” Columbia University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T., and Tibshirani, R. 2021. “An Introduction to Statistical Learning. With Applications in R.” Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jordan, K. N., Sterling, J., Pennebaker, J. W., and Boyd, R. L. 2019. “Examining long-term trends in politics and culture through language of political leaders and cultural institutions.” Proc. National Academy of Science 116 (9): 3476–3481. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jordan, K. 2022. “Language analysis in political psychology.” In Handbook of Language Analysis in Psychology, edited by M. Dehghani, R. L. Boyd, 159–172. Guilford Publications. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kacewicz, E., Pennebaker, J. W., Davis, M., Jeon, M., and Graesser, A. C. 2014. “Pronoun use reflects standings in social hierarchies.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 33(2): 125–143. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kreuz, R. 2023. “Linguistics Fingerprints. How Language Creates and Reveals Identity.” Prometheus Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labbé, D. 2007. “Experiments on authorship attribution by intertextual distance in English.” Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 14 (1): 33–80. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labbé, D., and Monière, D. 2008. “Je est-il un autre?” Proceedings JADT, 647–656.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, G., and Wehling, E. 2012. “The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic.” Free Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Markowitz, D. M. 2023. “Analytic thinking as revealed by function words: What does language really measure?” Applied Cognitive Psychology 37 (3): 1–8. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Markowitz, D. M., Kouchaki, M., Gino, F., Hancock, J. T., and Boyd, R. L. 2023. “Authentic first impressions relate to interpersonal, social, and entrepreneurial success.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 14 (2): 107–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Miller, G. A., and Charles, W. G. 1991. “Contextual correlates of semantic similarity.” Language and Cognitive Processes 6 (1): 1–28. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mitrovic, S., Andreoletti, D., and Ayoub, A. 2023. “ChatGPT or human? Detect and explain. Explaining decisions of machine learning model for detecting short ChatGPT-generated text.” Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Monzani, D., Vergani, L., Pizzoli, S. F. M., Marton, G., and Pravettoni, G. 2021. “Emotional tone, analytical thinking, and somatosensory processes of a sample of Italian tweets during the first phases of the COVID-19 pandemic: Observational study.” Journal of Medical Internet Research 23 (10). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Obradović, S., Power, S. A., and Sheehy-Skeffington, J. 2020. “Understanding the psychological appeal of populism.” Current Opinion in Psychology 35 (10):125–131. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ogden, C. K. 1968. “Basic English: International Second Language.” Harcourt.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Olsson, J. 2018. “More Wordcrime. Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics.” Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paradis, E. 2011. “Analysis of Phylogenetics and Evolution with R.” Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pennebaker, J. W. 2011. “The Secret Life of Pronouns. What our Words Say About Us.” Bloomsbury Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pennebaker, J. W., Chung, C. K., Frazee, J., Lavergne, G. M., and Beaver, D. I. 2014. “When small words foretell academic success: The case of college admissions essays.” PLoS ONE 91, Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Raubach, E. E. 2019. “Does political ideology influence how politicians speak?” Document numérique 1–21: 127–138.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Savoy, J. 2018a. “Analysis of the style and the rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential primaries.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33 (1): 143–159. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2018b. “Is Starnone really the author behind Ferrante?” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33 (4): 902–918. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020. “Machine Learning Methods for Stylometry. Authorship Attribution and Author Profiling.” Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Savoy, J., and Wehren, M. 2022. “Trump’s and Biden’s styles during the 2020 US presidential election.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37 (1): 229–241. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sherrill, R. 1967. “The Accidental President.” Grossman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stamatatos, E. 2009. “A survey of modern authorship attribution methods.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 60 (3): 433–214. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tausczik, Y. R., and Pennebaker, J. W. 2010. “The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29 (1):24–54. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L., and Polosukhin, I. 2017. “Attention is all you need.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 301: 6000–6010.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wolfram, S. 2023. “What is GPT-4 Doing… and What Does it Work?” Wolfram Research Inc., Champaign.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yule, G. 2020. “The Study of Language.” 7th ed., Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zakrzewski, C. 2023. “ChatGPT breaks its own rules on political messages.” Washington Post, Aug 28th.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhao, W., Zhou, K., Li, J., Tang, T., Wang, X., Hou, Y., Min, Y., Zhang, B., Zhang, J., Dong, Z., Du, Y., Yang, C., Chen, Y., Chen, Z., Jiang, J., Ren, R., Li, Y., Tang, X., Peiyu, P., Nie, J. Y., and Wen, J. R. 2023. “A survey of large language models.” Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue