Can spending too much time with AI chatbots quietly change the way humans speak and write? Several professionals say they are beginning to notice AI-style language creeping into their everyday conversations and workplace communications.
Tech Investor Catches AI Speech
Sara Wimmercranz, an investor at BackingMinds, caught herself kicking off a recent work gathering with a linguistic tool favoured by chatbots known as contrast framing. She started by telling the room this was not just a morning catch-up, but a reset.
It was exactly the kind of moment that concerned Wimmercranz: she had consumed so much AI-generated content that she found its language appearing in her own speech.
'We just sound like bots,' says the founding partner of a Stockholm-based venture capital firm.
According to Wimmercranz, office chatter increasingly resembles text generated by Claude or OpenAI's chatbot. She notices herself relying on sharper phrasing while falling into an un-Swedish practice: showering people with heavy compliments, like calling someone 'brilliant' or 'so smart' the way an overly agreeable language model would.
'In Sweden, the culture would just be quietly listen,' she says.
Wimmercranz is not alone in noticing the shift. The WSJ reports that people are spending significant amounts of time with AI and adopting chatbot-favoured phrases in conversations, Slack messages, emails and texts. Some describe these expressions as 'LLM-isms', while others call them 'Claude speak'.
Chatbot Language Spills Into Work
While Will Barnett, a Bay Area startup recruitment lead, insists he still talks like a real person, he admits his communications over Slack and email have taken on a stiff, robotic quality.
Barnett says AI has influenced his own writing style to such an extent that he now finds himself editing messages he wrote himself to make them sound less like AI.
'I will catch myself when I'm writing where I'm like, 'Oh my God, I shouldn't have even written that. I should have just let AI do it because it sounds the same,' he says. 'It's trained me to be more like it, instead of the reverse.'
The 42-year-old recruitment head now manually revises his own drafts to strip out the artificial tone—a tedious loop he points out is 'the exact same workflow if I was actually just using an LLM.'
AI Prompt-Speak Enters Meetings
New York-based AI consultant Allie K. Miller notes that startup founders often swap stories about 'cave man speak'—their term for a hyperdirect prompting style that uses as few words as possible to direct AI.
'They all shared that their cave man speak was bleeding into their everyday and that they would say things like, 'Why no bullets?,'' she explains, adding that she now treasures writing that predates ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 and vocabulary bots rarely use, like 'cacophony'.
Miller says the influence of AI prompting has also spilled into meetings, where colleagues sometimes use direct prompts on one another.
'If someone is rambling we will often interrupt and say what is the goal?,' she says, which speeds up conversation and helps the AI agent recording the meeting take better notes.
Workers Struggle to Sound Human
San Francisco AI startup employee Daniel Wolkowitz struggles to distinguish messages drafted by generative tools from those written by colleagues who have unknowingly started writing like AI.
While specific phrases like 'it's not this, it's that' are appearing in workplace messages, the 38-year-old warns that 'My hunch is that we're atrophying our brains,' adding that he suspects more people are starting to naturally communicate that way.
San Francisco tech founder Deepan Mehta has introduced a workplace 'swear jar' of sorts for AI-style language, maintaining an office whiteboard where teammates collect tallies for robotic chatter.
The 33-year-old startup chief hands out marks for terms like 'genuinely', 'load-bearing', 'smoking gun', 'X is the new Y', or 'crazy hyphenated contractions that no one would normally use,' warning that whoever racks up the most weekly tallies must fund the team happy hour.
Corporate Jargon Gets an AI Makeover
Washington, D.C. nonprofit executive David Bohigian believes chatbot phrasing may draw from the same linguistic style that classically trained business professionals and lawyers have used for years.
'I had read 500 business books before AI came out,' notes the 56-year-old CEO, adding that 'And AI has read those same books and 500 more.'
While he has spent years dropping prompt-style commands like 'think like an analyst' or 'let's red team this', he observes that acronyms like 'Bottom line up front' (BLUF) are now more easily understood by more people.
PR veteran Angela Nibbs has spent two decades fighting executive buzzwords, but notes that generative tools are making her job significantly harder.
When she asks startup founders about their origin stories, they often skip a personal story and instead launch into corporate talking points like 'three key pillars', market opportunities, and competitive differentiation.
'Everyone sounds polished,' she says, 'but no one sounds particularly interesting.'
