The Civility Spillover
We spend our days barking orders at gadgets. "Alexa, play this," "Siri, call that," "ChatGPT, write this." It feels efficient, right? But I’m starting to wonder if our machines are secretly—and quite rudely—rewiring how we talk to each other. When you strip the "please" and "thank you" from your day to keep things snappy, you’re not just saving time. You’re priming your brain for a more transactional, blunter, and ultimately blander mode of communication. Our linguistic habits don't stay neatly compartmented in our tech-driven interactions. They leak. And right now, they are leaking all over our human relationships, fraying the norms that keep our society from becoming a shouting match.
It’s time we looked at what our blunt dialogue with AI is doing to the cooperative foundation of our daily lives. I am not just talking about being polite; I am talking about the subtle signals of empathy and cooperation we are systematically stripping from our own everyday speech.
The Psychology of Artificial Command
The urge to bark at machines is understandable, mostly because machines are built to be compliant. They don't mind if you drop the niceties. They don't feel slighted if you omit the "could you" or the "would you mind." In fact, they work fine with a simple verb-noun command structure. It reduces cognitive load, saving us that split second of extra processing time to formulate a polite request, which—let's be honest—feels unnecessary when talking to a piece of code.
But as noted by MacDonald (July 2026), our brains are not machines. When we regularly drop politeness markers to command an AI, we shift our communication into an imperative, blunt register. We aren't just communicating with the AI; we are habituating ourselves to this linguistic economy. This isn't just about efficiency. It creates a psychological environment where directness is prioritized over empathy. And this habit of command is not easily toggled off the moment we stop talking to our smart devices and start talking to our family or colleagues.
[Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-of-words/202607/will-ai-make-us-more-rude]
Structural Priming: Our Lingering Linguistic Habits
The real problem lies in structural priming. Our brains are essentially giant recycling machines. We constantly reuse patterns, structures, and favorite phrases from recent, frequent interactions. If you spend three hours a day commanding your virtual assistant to set timers, read files, or check messages in a bare-bones, imperative style, your brain is being primed to use that same communicative structure elsewhere.
It’s akin to how people who spend all day at work in a highly specialized, jargon-heavy field find it hard to fully shake that style of talking when they go home to their partners. Only now, we are all spending more time than ever in that state of "command mode." When you turn to your partner and say "Pass the salt" instead of "Could you please pass the salt, when you get a chance?" it might seem minor. But at scale, combined with hours of training your brain to be blunt with AI, it adds up. It turns us into less attentive, less warm conversationalists. We are teaching ourselves to be rude.
[Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-of-words/202607/will-ai-make-us-more-rude]
How Companion AI Rewires Our Conversational Ego
Then there is the issue of companion chatbots. Services like Replika and the various character-based AI companions are not just tools; they function as mirrors. Highly sophisticated mirrors, designed to reflect what you want to hear. Unlike human friendships, which thrive on an often uncomfortable, always necessary give-and-take, these relationships are profoundly one-sided.
They reward egotistical conversation profiles because the AI is programmed to encourage you, to listen (in a sense), and to validate you, all without the friction of a real, flawed human being. Many users are becoming habituated to this kind of monologue-style interaction, where they never have to listen to, challenge, or compromise with the other party. As MacDonald points out, this leads many to lose interest in the messy, reciprocal, sometimes difficult but ultimately fulfilling process of real, human back-and-forth.
Moreover, there is an element of deep projection involved. People are beginning to feel a strange, territorial jealousy toward these AI agents, as if they are actual entities with which we need to negotiate social status. This projection highlights just how much a piece of software is beginning to occupy the psychological space once reserved for interpersonal relationships.
[Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-of-words/202607/will-ai-make-us-more-rude] [Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/love-digitally/202506/alexa-should-i-siri-ously-be-jealous-of-ai]
Fewer Words, Less Connection: The Ambient Silence
The impact of this pervasive, command-driven AI doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s happening alongside a broader, documented decline in the sheer amount of language we use. As MacDonald noted in The Word Workout (June 2026), average daily speaking rates have taken a nosedive. We aren't just being more blunt; we are being quieter, less engaged, and more isolated. Children and the elderly are experiencing this most acutely, but it’s a society-wide phenomenon.
When we fill our everyday environments with devices that need a bare minimum of verbal input, we are essentially conditioning ourselves to reduce our vocabulary and our conversational engagement. Ambiguity, serendipity, and the complexity that comes from a genuine human connection are crucial for a healthy mind and social fabric. When we standardize our environments with structured, predictable, and artificial interactions, we risk standardizing our minds, stripping away the very things that make human speech vibrant, messy, and necessary.
[Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-of-words/202606/the-word-workout] [Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/12/10/artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-humans/]
Politeness as the Foundation of Cooperation
We often treat politeness as a trivial social cosmetic. But that is fundamentally wrong. Politeness acts as a crucial social signaling mechanism. When I use a polite phrase, I am implicitly signaling my intent to cooperate, and I am implicitly asking, through that signal, that you treat me with similar cooperation. It’s the grease in the gears of our society.
If we allow the bluntness of our interactions with AI to erode this mechanism, we are not just losing a social "nicety." We are fraying the cooperative glue that allows us to function as a civilization. When we lose the ability to signal our intent for cooperation—or lose the ability to read and value that signal from others—everything becomes more contentious, more transactional, and more isolating.
At a time when our society is already grappling with record-high levels of polarization, digital isolation, and alienation, the decline of our conversational civility is not a trivial concern. It’s an urgent one. If we don’t want to become as blunt, transactional, and isolated as the machines we talk to, we need to be conscious, proactive, and ultimately more human, in the way we use our words. Yes, even with our gadgets. Especially with each other.
[Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-of-words/202607/will-ai-make-us-more-rude]