I have a lovely coworker who expresses himself like LLM chatbots. As far as I know he isn’t using them in the offending exchanges, including because he does it orally and in short Slack messages. But the tells are there: overly cheery in a context that doesn’t warrant it, bullet points everywhere (although rarely exactly three, another LLM tell), repeating most of what I said to him (although it can make sense in some contexts).
If I hadn’t seen him in a videoconference I’d have more doubts, although video generation has gone a long way. More importantly, this is what I mean when I say I don’t want to be “tainted” by interacting in natural language with a computer system. My personal expression style hasn’t changed since I started using programming languages to make computers do my bidding, and yet sustained exposure to LLM output, whether you requested it or it was imposed on you, can do that for you.
I feel like “expressing oneself like a chatbot” should be an insult, and so I’m staying as far as possible from these abominations.
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•Hypolite Petovan
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•that their use of language might not be a consequence of using LLMs.
For example, I like bullet point lists and em-dashes and bolding parts of sentences and digesting things down, but I now use AI to ... sound less "like AI", lest people tell me I sound like AI, and I know I'm not the only person in that boat by a lot.
Hypolite Petovan
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•not really no. if anything, that you scrutinize my social media posts like that further amplifies my fear that the way I speak has to be policed, since not doing so would invite insult.
What if I had used a bullet point list?
Hypolite Petovan
•Nasher 🦓
•I'm prone to making lists in written exchanges, and I've always been, even before AI.
But I can relate to what you say because I have a colleague with whom talking, may it be using phone, visio or in person, feels like talking to an AI agent.
He's supposed to be an IT director but he repeats what I just said in a dumbed down, less technical way.
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Hypolite Petovan
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