Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have led to significant strides in language generation technol-ogies,with chatbots like ChatGPT demonstrating proficiency in conversation and question answering.This paper in-vestigates the differences between machine-generated language and human language by analyzing responses to 3 293 open-domain Chinese questions from humans and ChatGPT.The analysis examines 161 linguistic features in five di-mensions:descriptive characteristics,word frequency,lexical diversity,syntactic complexity,and discourse cohe-sion.Classification algorithms are employed to assess the efficacy of these features in distinguishing between the two types of language.The results reveal significant differences in 77 linguistic features across descriptive characteristics,word frequency,and lexical diversity.Human language tends to exhibit higher readability,lower argument overlap,a more colloquial style,a richer vocabulary,and greater interactivity compared to machine-generated language.