The Atlantic reports that people in and around tech are importing chatbot vocabulary into daily conversation. Workers now describe memory lapses as "hallucinating," explain their moods as "high temperature," and blame confusion on "context rot." The language of machine learning is becoming the language of self-description.
Language shapes how people think about themselves. When Silicon Valley's strange new dialect flattens human messiness into software metaphors, it gives tech's worldview authority it hasn't earned. Once this jargon moves from insider slang into HR departments and management training, it stops sounding quirky and starts determining how people are evaluated, hired, and promoted.
AI terminology will migrate into performance reviews and corporate training. When bosses start talking about employees "updating priors" or "suffering context rot," the dialect becomes doctrine. The real test: whether this language actually changes how companies treat people who don't fit the model.
This is status laundering. Calling yourself "high temperature" wraps ordinary unpredictability in the prestige of AI, and Silicon Valley loves any phrase that makes its habits sound like systems theory. The deeper tell is psychological: an industry that spent years insisting machines would learn to think is now teaching people to narrate themselves like products. Silicon Valley's strange new dialect borrows words and borrows legitimacy in the same breath.
Filed to the Technology desk · Aug 20