Don't Talk to People Like They're Chatbots

For most of history, communicating with a computer has not been like communicating with a person. In their earliest years, computers required carefully constructed instructions, delivered through punch cards; then came a command-line interface, followed by menus and options and text boxes. If you wanted results, you needed to learn the computer's language. This is beginning to change. Large language models--the technology undergirding modern chatbots--allow users to interact with computers through natural conversation, an innovation that introduces some baggage from human-to-human exchanges.