I just gave my final end semester exam a couple days ago when I bumped into an old friend and we got into talking and discussing some important topics for the test.
I was midway through explaining a concept he hadn’t covered when he stopped me. He pointed out that my way of speaking had completely changed and how it was unusually structured and didn’t give him the opportunity to ask follow up questions.
and that’s when it hit me - I think the more often I use AI, the more I start talking to people like how I engineer prompts for LLMs and not just over messages or text - even in person.
even the concept I was explaining - definition, descriptions, potential follow up questions and edge cases in that order.
What’s funny is that this isn’t even intentional - it’s what I believe in my head is the more “efficient” way to express my thoughts and ideas than entirely separate, broken up conversations.
The more surprising part is the unusual reactions of the other people getting a better picture and context of what I’m explaining without the usual back and forth - which has landed me my fair share of complaints of having to hear mini lectures, but not more than people appreciative of the fuller picture.
It made me realize that while we’re training AI to be more human, the conversations might be training us to be more structured and honestly I’m not sure if this makes me a better communicator or just a better prompt engineer, but it’s a hard habit to break.