Is AI Making Us Meaner?

As any new technology emerges, people naturally worry about job displacements, new challenges to human flourishing, and threats to traditional ways of life.

The internet gave us instant access to practically any information we need around the world, but it also gave crackpots and criminals a great way to coordinate fresh harms to society. Similarly, social media has become a powerful entertainment tool, which is fine until it eats into the hours you should be spending on other worthwhile activities like going for walks or sleeping.

With the growing popularity of generative AI, these kinds of questions are once again at the forefront of many conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) are practical assistants in daily life, they carry their own risks for well-being and social health. People are understandably worried about how automated content generation affects human creativity and impacts the lives of creators, writers, and artists.

Those are legitimate concerns to consider and discuss, but there’s another question most of us have been ignoring: could the way we talk to AI reshape how we communicate with the humans around us?

How AI chats may be setting a new tone

Language models like ChatGPT are growing in daily ubiquity, with practically every major tech company…