Plainspokenness is a World of LLMs

Boz writes about how valuable it is to be plainspoken, and I fully agree. However, herein lies one of my biggest concerns for the short-term future with the rise of large language models in our daily lives.

There is nothing to hold back someone from making their email a bit fancier with some generative magic, only for the recipient to ask the same AI to summarize the text in one sentence. How much miscommunication will occur when this technology becomes a part of our everyday lives? I hope it will be beneficial 🤞, but with everyone seemingly rushing to incorporate these features into their products, I worry that it will only make communication less clear.

I asked ChatGPT what the opposite of “plainspokenness” is, and it responded with one option being “equivocation.” If I were to receive an email with “equivocation” in it, my non-native English self would definitely have to go back to the AI to figure out what was meant.