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Immediately, after a keynote speaker I was coaching for a large conference finished her rehearsal I pulled her aside. \u201cHow much of your script was written by AI?\u201d I asked. She looked up at me out of the corner of her eye and hesitantly said, \u201cMost of it.\u201d I delicately shared with her that I could hear it. She started several sentences with phrases like: \u201cHere\u2019s the thing,\u201d \u201cThe truth is,\u201d and the word \u201cUnlock!\u201d She sounded like a bot and not like a human, and, if I could hear it, I was certain the audience would too.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Around the same time, a speechwriter I work with told me her client kept barking orders at her as if she was speaking to her AI assistant. \u201cDelete that.\u201d \u201cMove that. No, not that.\u201d \u201cReplace this phrase.\u201d Her client was an early AI adopter who was used to dictating edits to an LLM and now, she was treating the speechwriter the same way.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a public speaking and executive communication coach and work with senior leaders and founders at companies like Amazon AWS, Google, Panasonic, which means I spend a lot of time inside the communication habits of people who are heavy AI users. For the past six months, I\u2019ve been noticing a change in how people are talking to one another: I call it BotTalk.<\/p>\n
BotTalk is when AI starts bleeding into the way you talk to people. For example: giving commands without context or asking questions without warmth. It\u2019s when humanity gets edited out of the conversation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The people doing it aren\u2019t trying to be rude or cold. They\u2019ve just been optimizing their communication for a system that doesn\u2019t need a greeting, doesn\u2019t need a \u201chow are you doing,\u201d doesn\u2019t need any of the connective tissue that makes human conversation feel like, well, human conversation.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the first time technology has changed how we communicate. When texting arrived, linguists warned it would flatten our language. Some of it did bleed into how we speak. Columbia professor John McWhorter, in his TED Talk on language and texting, called texting \u201cfingered speech,\u201d<\/a> pointing out that words like \u201clol\u201d stopped being typed and started being said out loud. We adapted to the constraints of the medium, and the medium changed us in turn.<\/p>\n What\u2019s different now isn\u2019t the direction of influence. It\u2019s the scale, the speed, and the fact that something else is happening alongside the vocabulary shift. It\u2019s also impacting how we treat each other: we\u2019re getting less patient.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n