AI is teaching us to speak like bots and its a problem

Immediately, after a keynote speaker I was coaching for a large conference finished her rehearsal I pulled her aside. “How much of your script was written by AI?” I asked. She looked up at me out of the corner of her eye and hesitantly said, “Most of it.” I delicately shared with her that I could hear it. She started several sentences with phrases like: “Here’s the thing,” “The truth is,” and the word “Unlock!” She sounded like a bot and not like a human, and, if I could hear it, I was certain the audience would too. 

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. “Delete that.” “Move that. No, not that.” “Replace this phrase.” 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.

I’m 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’ve been noticing a change in how people are talking to one another: I call it BotTalk.

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’s when humanity gets edited out of the conversation.

The people doing it aren’t trying to be rude or cold. They’ve just been optimizing their communication for a system that doesn’t need a greeting, doesn’t need a “how are you doing,” doesn’t need any of the connective tissue that makes human conversation feel like, well, human conversation.

This isn’t 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 “fingered speech,” pointing out that words like “lol” stopped being typed and started being said out loud. We adapted to the constraints of the medium, and the medium changed us in turn.

What’s different now isn’t the direction of influence. It’s the scale, the speed, and the fact that something else is happening alongside the vocabulary shift. It’s also impacting how we treat each other: we’re getting less patient.

AI responds instantly and never takes a breath. It doesn’t need a moment to think or get back to you. And the more time you spend in that kind of exchange, the more human hesitation starts to feel like a problem to solve. The colleague who needs a day to think or the direct report who takes a breath before answering, or the client who wants to talk something through before deciding start to feel slow. And slow starts to feel like a problem. I see this in sessions every week. 

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development analyzed 360,000 YouTube videos and 771,000 podcast episodes recorded before and after ChatGPT’s release and found a measurable shift. In the 18 months after ChatGPT launched, speakers used words like “meticulous,” “delve,” “realm,” and “adept” up to 51 percent more frequently than in the three years prior. A separate team at Florida State University found the same pattern after analyzing 22 million words from unscripted conversational podcasts, documenting what they call the “seep-in effect.”

And researchers suggest the influence goes beyond word choice. Sociolinguistic researchers studying AI’s influence on speech note that short-term communication adjustments made during repeated AI interactions can, over time, lead to long-term changes in how people speak, affecting not just what words they use but the overall style and structure of their communication. The language becomes more organized, more formal, and, in the words of one researcher in a widely circulated interview, flatter. Which means it is less animated and more processed-sounding.

This has a cost.

When you strip the warmth out of how you communicate, you don’t just sound different, your words land differently and hurt your chances for genuine connection.

The executives and senior leaders I’ve seen struggling right now aren’t struggling because they don’t know their material. They’re struggling because something in their delivery has fallen flat. They’re outputting instead of connecting. And what I’m noticing is the more time they spend communicating with AI, the more their own communication starts to reflect it back. The cadence. The polish. The way a thought is structured. It sounds competent. It just doesn’t sound like them anymore. And audiences feel that gap, even when they can’t name it.

And there’s research that tells us why this matters beyond just “being nice.” A study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that the more time people spend interacting with emotionally capable AI, the more they start to perceive real people as less human. The researchers call it “assimilation-induced dehumanization.” You see AI as more human, so real humans start to look a little less so. And when that happens, how you treat them shifts too, even if you don’t realize it.

For leaders, that’s a trust problem. For teams, that’s a culture problem. For anyone who has to persuade, influence, or inspire other human beings for a living, that’s a you problem.

Here’s what it looks like on the ground: a leader starts to communicate in a more transactional way and the people around them start to self-censor. They stop sharing bad news, they stop pushing back, and they stop telling you what you actually need to hear. You don’t lose their effort, you start to lose their candor. And for executives, that is often the thing that matters most.

The good news is this isn’t hard to fix. It just requires, what I like to say, noticing what you notice. 

Here are a few things to think about:

• Notice if you’re actually listening or just waiting to respond. AI doesn’t need to be heard. It just needs to be prompted. When we spend a lot of time in that dynamic, we can lose the habit of genuine listening without realizing it. The next time you ask someone a question, stay with their answer. Let it land before you go anywhere. That pause isn’t dead air. It’s the conversation working. I have been teaching improv for several years, and one of the first things we teach is “yes, and,” not because it makes you agreeable, but because it forces you to actually receive what someone just gave you before you add anything. You can’t “yes, and” something you weren’t listening to.

• Notice when you’re making a command instead of inviting. Commands close conversations and questions open them. If everything you’re sending is a directive, you’re prompting, not communicating. Here is something you can consider the next time you are having a 1:1 with a direct report or colleague: try opening with a question that isn’t work related. “What’s one thing you’re looking forward to this weekend?” or “What’s been the highlight of your week so far?” This works because it shows the other person you care about them, it builds trust, and they will also be more likely to follow through with the task at hand.

• Bring your body back into it. AI has no body. No breath, no pause, no hesitation, no pulse. When you speak like a human, use what a human has. Slow down. Take a moment to pause. Let yourself find the word if you can’t think of it in the moment. Feel the floor beneath your feet. Before a presentation, high stakes meeting or difficult conversation, what are you doing to prepare beforehand? Breathing? Moving your body? Listening to your favorite music? Escaping to do power poses in the bathroom? Take some time to center your body. 

We built AI to sound more human and it is getting better at doing this with each passing day. 

And now, quietly, we’re starting to sound more like it. 

So the next time you’re standing at Samantha-in-IT’s desk, just check in with yourself: did I just talk to her, or did I prompt her? Because she’s not a chatbot. And honestly, she’s noticed that you treat her like one.

Remember, when you communicate like a human, with something real to say, that’s still the most powerful thing in any room.