Habeas Corpus: an exploration of authentic embodiment and ecology in a French contrastive corpus
Authors
Sophia BurnettKey Information
Journal
Published in Vol. 4 No. 1 (2026) of AI-Linguistica. Linguistic Studies on AI-Generated Texts and Discourses.
AI-Linguistica. Linguistic Studies on AI-Generated Texts and Discourses is a new scholarly journal aiming at providing a publishing plateform for researchers from all areas of Linguistics (interfacing with neighboring fields: Communication Science, Media and Journalism Studies, Computational Linguistics) to reflect on generated texts from a variety of perspectives: theoretical, descriptive, and applied.
We understand ‘generated texts’ in a broad sense, including formats as diverse as texts generated by Large Language Models, AI-powered smart agents (i.e. chatbots, voice assistants, social bots etc.), writing assistance tools, template-based software, and neural machine translation services.
About the JournalAbstract
This article outlines a study in French contrasting human and large language model (LLM) textual production. Participants were composed of undergraduate students at the Université de Lorraine, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o. Both responded to the same prompt: You have been taken hostage by friendly but determined androids. Please write a letter to your friends and family to reassure them that you’re okay. The study’s central question draws on a legal analogy with habeas corpus, “you have the body”: Is the conscious, authentic, human body identifiably detained in human/LLM produced texts? Rather than focusing on the generative capabilities of LLMs, this study uses AI output as a hybrid foil to reveal whether there is a quantifiable proximity between the human identifier, and ecocognitive tokens in contrast with the LLM output. Corpus data was divided into three subgroups: (1) LLM-only texts, (2) human-only texts, and (3) hybrid texts, where humans post-edited LLM output to personally appropriate it, allowing for triangulated comparison. Using a framework derived from a combination of embodiment theory (cognitive linguistics), and ecolinguistics, the study uses textometric analysis (TXM) and computational corpus analysis to explore small corpora. These are used to weight features that may indicate authentic embodiment and ecology to propose an ‘Embodiment Scale’.
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