And if we’ve met recently, I’ve probably noticed it — and been annoyed by it.
As someone who was an active member of my university debating team — and, more generally, as a person who is curious about everything happening around the world — I try to stay up to date on policies, changing social trends, the latest technology, and just about everything else. I also try to have an opinion on all of it.
Naturally, I enjoy conversations in which people exchange opinions and pit them against one another. It may be a strange way of bonding, but these were the conversations I found most enjoyable, from school and college until just a few months ago, when I stopped enjoying them quite as much.
The reason, I realised, was the effect of AI.
Everyone has an opinion. Almost nobody has an original one.
When I was on my university debating team, I would meet newcomers, experienced debaters, lawyers, engineers, and people from all sorts of backgrounds. They would offer radically different perspectives on the same topic and very different ideas about how things could work. It could be a policy, a social movement, a new technology and its effect on society — whatever it was, people approached it differently.
Lately, whenever I ask, “What do you think about immigration?” or “What do you think about this new economic policy?”, I am surprised by how confidently everyone has an opinion. More often than before, I hear people say, “Here’s what I think is going to happen,” and then lay out a firm view — even on remarkably niche subjects.
But everyone also seems to sound the same, most of the time parroting ChatGPT.
I recognise this because, on many occasions, I have tried to educate myself by asking ChatGPT or Claude to summarise what is happening — perhaps in a war in the Middle East or with a new government policy. When I later talk to someone about it, I often hear the exact same language and references echoed back to me.
Sometimes, I feel as though I can tell who uses Claude and who uses ChatGPT. We now have our own prompts and AI ecosystems surrounding our lives. It is uncanny how similar the opinions of people who regularly interact with the same AI models tend to become.
At this point, I feel surrounded by people with opinions but, surprisingly, very little originality or diversity of thought. It is a little scary. It also makes these conversations exhausting. Everyone seems to agree on the same framing and the same basic points that the same AI has told everybody.
For some reason, all of this also appears to make people cling more strongly to their ideas. I don’t know exactly why, but it is something I have noticed.
Beyond being annoyed by this lack of originality — and unsure how to find people with more original ideas — I find it genuinely concerning. We know that AI models have biases. They may be corrected over time, but now that so many people are using AI to form their opinions, those biases can be amplified.
I am not saying that everyone holds the same position. They don’t. Some people support one side, while others support the opposite side. But the basic arguments they make for either side often sound exactly like those an AI model — ChatGPT or Claude, specifically — would produce.
It is making me shy away from introducing ideas, starting conversations, or asking people for their opinions. I feel as though they are probably going to repeat exactly what ChatGPT or Claude has already told me.
Many of these opinions may not even come directly from a chatbot. People may have read an article or post supposedly written by a human who relied heavily on AI — on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or just about anywhere else we look.
We are starting to talk the way we prompt
That is one way AI is changing our conversations. The second is that the way we talk to one another is becoming different, because the way we prompt an AI is different from the way we talk to a person.
Here is one pattern I have noticed: you can make grammatical mistakes when talking to an AI. You can be informal. That is all fine. But you must also be extremely specific and detailed: “Make no mistakes. Follow these steps exactly.”
People who work with AI frequently — especially entry-level employees who rely on chatbots to do much of their work — sometimes carry this pattern into their everyday interactions.
And that is genuinely annoying.
I don’t want people to prompt me. I want them to talk to me in their own style, with originality and personality.
There is also the grammar and sentence structure ChatGPT tends to use. Some people have begun responding like ChatGPT. They are probably not actually using it to compose their replies; they may simply have trained themselves to communicate that way.
I see this as an emergency, particularly for very young people who are relying on AI to form their thinking and thought processes. They may now begin to think and develop like AI.
I am not commenting on whether this makes them more logical, more intelligent, or less intelligent. That is not what this article is about, and it is not something I want to examine deeply right now.
I simply think people are losing some of their individuality.
Original thought is becoming a luxury good
I am also starting to understand how the Industrial Revolution caused handmade products to nearly disappear from the mainstream. They did not vanish altogether; instead, they became more expensive and were relegated to a niche market.
I think I am beginning to see how the same thing could happen to original human expression. There is now so much AI slop about every conceivable topic on the internet. But when I encounter an original article, I recognise it. I can tell when it contains a genuinely distinctive opinion. Often, I find this writing in elite publications such as The Economist or The Atlantic — not all of it, but occasionally I stumble on an idea that I know is uniquely original.
I think I would pay a premium simply to hear those actual human voices and natural human opinions.
