AI Is Changing the Way Humans Speak to Each Other

Chatbot use has quickly skyrocketed. It’s already having major effects across a range of sectors and even on our minds in some of the worst ways possible.

A more subtle effect they had on us is in our speech patterns. Because of chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, among others, we all sound like chatbots now.

A study by the Max Planck Institute found that in the 18 months after ChatGPT’s release, academic YouTubers started using terms like “meticulous,” “adept,” and “delve,” up to 51% more. This was no mere coincidence, since these just so happen to be the exact words ChatGPT loves to pepper throughout a response.

According to the researchers, is that most people weren’t even aware they were doing it since they were unable to see the larger patterns and vocabulary use. The researchers also suspect that AI is nudging us toward a more emotionally neutral manner of speaking, turning so much of the way people online speak into a deeply uninteresting beige wall of text that lacks the telltale markers of human passion.

Everything’s becoming overly polished, like we’re staring directly into the eye of a text-based version of the uncanny valley. Yet not enough of us are feeling adequately creeped out by it.

AI Is Changing How Humans Speak to Each Other

This also applies to smaller implementations of AI, like AutoCorrect, spellcheck, and smart replies. As pointed out by Sara Parker of The Verge, studies from Cornell show that smart replies improve communication between people…until one of the parties in the chat realizes that their chat partner might be using AI.

Then suddenly, they seem cold, fake, and kind of pushy. All that built up goodwill gets tossed out the window, replaced with a sudden air of distrust.

AI strips away the mess that makes us human. As imperfect creatures, we might have the perfect thing to say in a situation, but not the perfect way to say it. That imperfection is what makes us relatable to other people.

AI erases that. It creates responses in day-to-day chats that are so pitch perfect, with every comma in its place, with no fat left to trim, that it becomes suspicious. It also doesn’t help that chatbots are not good with anything that even slightly deviates from nonstandard American English. Anything involving regional dialects is lost on AI.

AI is flattening out culture, smoothing over the jagged edges of human communication, and scrubbing away the minor nuances that distinguish one person’s conversational patterns from another, making us all sound like the same overly polished, off-puttingly enthusiastic, inauthentic replica of a human.

It’s fundamentally changing the ways we’re talking to each other. We can sometimes pick up on it, but the question is, will enough of us realize it before it strips us of our individuality?