Guys, the cognitive numbness caused by ChatGPT’s style of documentation and meeting room discussion is here, real and bad ….
I am getting more and more design documents/disucussiosn that now have wording like “here is what it means,” “here is why it matters,” “Instead of this it is that” “five reasons why this is important” “..it is inherently bad at” ” the X has sfhited to Y” …and repeated usage of Goal/Insights/Strategic/Impact and so on….
The experience felt exactly like watching Instagram reels, every other reel uses the same song or music in the story, the plot lines are similar, the visual aspects are in the same vicinity and so on ..
The effect Instagram had on me is that it numbed my mind with no focus on what was shown and no significant recall of it. Which is exactly opposite of what our roles at the workplace expect us to do ….
Just to be fair, such words showing up in docs and meetings aren’t a new phenomenon. When Stephen Covey released his books, we suddenly had synergy and win-win showing up in every conversation. The same thing happened to books and talks by Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, till your latest Darios and Altmans. But this jarganification of normal conversation happened over a longer timeline. So our brains had time to adapt and adjust.
This ” feel thoughtful without actually thinking about it ” style of narration was useful for social media engagement and payouts. And now, LLMs have pushed it on everyone’s keyboard. Sadly, people are dumping the conceptual rearrangement and problem reframing and discourse dissemination without realizing what it is and what effect it will have.
So the problems of the humanities domain i.e logic, fallacies, rhetoric, synthesis, nuance and so on, are becoming problems of software engineering …
as an engineer with a master’s in humanities am more worried …