Fun fact I heard during a recent team meating we had: MPs are increasingly say 'I rise to talk' before making a statement in the House of Commons, and this intro-phrase is apparently an americanism, the theory being that MP assistants have been using AI to write spoken contributions, hence the increase.
And it's not just the MPs, they're mirroring a wider social trend for people increasingly speaking like robots!
The Chatbotification of Human Speech
Large language models (LLMs) learn from billions of words, gaining the capacity to generate text that sounds natural, polite, and logical. These bots are neutral tools, technologically speaking.
And we're all using it: to draft emails, social media posts, even Tinder messages, and so our language is incresingly becoming narrowed in tone.
And researchers have now found that people who are exposed to AI-generated text tend to involuntarily mimic it without even knowing it.
I guess it's not surprising that when people 'co-create with AI' they take on its habits: people are now increasingly likely to engage in hedging ("arguably," "to some extent"), use neutral tones ("it can be said"), and a preference for soft, formal vocabulary.
Specifcally, soft-professional sounding words and phrases such as indeed, moreover, and in light of this are becoming increasingly common in speach, not just in written communcations.
The Politeness Trap
It’s easy to see why this happens. AI systems like ChatGPT are trained to avoid offense and controversy. They’re designed to sound reasonable and balanced—even when users aren’t. The result is a kind of digital politeness contagion. We’ve become so used to the “AI tone” that our own speech is starting to emulate it: smoother, vaguer, less emotionally raw.
The result is a lattening out the human voice. If we all start to sound like the same cleansed chatbot, what becomes of creativity, playfulness, or opposition?
Final Thoughts
Personally I think I'm too far gone (too old) to start being influenced by AI in the way I speak, I'm also way to couldn't give a fuck about swearing and too proud of my working class slight roughness, so not a problem for me.
I also think this is maybe a strength of reform... they do seem to have a lot of rough and ready straight talking people, while maybe the AI talk is something we get with the mid-range professions and the establishment parties....
I actually think NOT talking like a robot is going to do people well going forwards! At least if you want to be listend to!