Welcome to today’s episode. Have you ever noticed how your vocabulary seems to shift when you jump on a Zoom call or watch a lecture online? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have found that since ChatGPT launched, words like “meticulous,” “delve,” “realm,” and “adept” are up to 51 percent more common in academic videos. One lead author even warns, “Delve is only the tip of the iceberg.”

But it’s not just word choice. AI is shaping tone, favoring longer, more structured speech with muted emotion. Cornell studies show smart replies boost cooperation—but if your chat partner might be using AI, you trust them less. Mor Naaman at Cornell Tech says we’re losing basic humanity signals—those little stumbles and quirks that say, “This is me, I’m human.”

As AI flattens dialects and standardizes expression, the question isn’t if our speech will change—it’s whether we’ll fight to keep the imperfect, emotional bits that make us truly human.
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