Alexa, shut up!
When my wife talks to ChatGPT, she uses polite language. She greets the chatbot, kindly asks for answers, and even says thank you and goodbye.
I, on the other hand, get straight to the point: I ask my question, get my answer, and close the chat—no thanks, no farewell. 🙃
All the while knowing that I’m talking to a large language model (LLM) that generates responses based on statistical word building blocks (tokens).
Polite and friendly versus cold and fact-driven.
It’s the same with our voice assistant at home. In the morning, I’ll bluntly ask, “Alexa, what’s the weather today?” or, when I’m sluggish, just “Alexa, weather!”
No unnecessary fillers. No please. No thank you.
But what does that do to us? To our language? To the way we interact with each other? 🤔
In the past, this wasn’t an issue. Machines had their own technical language.
No programmer ever worried about making their code polite—it just had to work.
Today, things are different. Machines speak our language. We’re talking to them more often and for longer periods than to actual people.
But what does that do to our language? What’s being lost in the process?
Are we getting so used to this cold, clipped communication that it’s seeping into our conversations with other humans? 😟
And let’s not forget: if machines ever do take over the world, they’ll surely remember who treated them kindly.
Maybe we should try to be a little nicer—not just to machines, but to each other.
Who knows, by being kinder, we might just save the world someday. 😉
Alexa, sleep tight! 💤
