Robots Have No Voice

Robot writing has no voice. That’s why you find it annoying. Like it or not, your brain is currently one of the best organic pattern matchers in the known solar system, and that means you can detect patterns. Like breathing, you just do this. All the time. You are not being triggered by the endless em dashes; it’s not the trailing participial clauses, and the incessant adverb transitions. It’s that the robot does not care about what it’s writing; it has near-infinite data at its disposal, and it’s been instructed to keep you happy because that makes good business sense. Let’s discuss each in reverse order: Brown-noser: Like any good business, the job of the robot is to make you a repeat customer, and that means it needs to efficiently respond to your prompt. Two parts to explain here: Efficiently. If you’re using ChatGPT or Claude on the web, those respective companies have provided the robot with meta guidance on how to answer. I suspect they provide a clause you never see that reads…