Democracy Dies in Darkness
Opinion

It’s happening: People are starting to talk like ChatGPT

Unnervingly, words overrepresented in chatbot responses are turning up more in human conversation.

5 min
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A robot has a speech bubble coming to its ear on the left that reads "Please help me write something". Another speech bubble comes from its mouth reading "DELVE METICULOUS TAPESTRY COMMENDABLE"
(Illustration by Chiqui Esteban/The Washington Post; Iuliia Morozova/iStock)
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Adam Aleksic is the author of “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.”

If you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or another artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot, you’re probably operating under the assumption that you’re both speaking the same language. You input English, it outputs English. Simple, right? Except that’s a misconception: You’ve actually been speaking different languages.

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