I've seen this expressed as a concern even from one of my colleagues. My retort was:
"English is not my native language and LLMs taught me quite a few very useful formalisms that do land well for people and they change their attitude towards you to be more respectful afterwards. It also showed me how to frame and reframe certain arguments. I agree sounding like an LLM is kind of sad but I am getting a lot of educational value -- and with time I'll sneak my own voice back in these newly learned idioms and ways to talk."
Since you seem interested in the ins and outs of English, I want to say that "retort" has a connotation of anger or sharpness. Your response reads more like a "rebuttal" to me.
This is not a correction; maybe retort is what you meant and I'm not trying to be the English police. I just like discussing the intricacies of language :)
Like most of all widely spoken languages, there's a lot of regional variation in English. There's even a bunch of quizzes online where you answer 20 questions about phrasings, and they can tell you where you're from with a disconcertingly high degree of accuracy.
In my experience a "retort" is sharp or witty, but certainly not angry, whereas the word "rebuttal" is itself essentially antagonistic. You might use it when referring to something or someone that you look down upon, whereas a more neutral term would simply be "response."
Just personally I tend to regard retort as short and reactive while rebuttal as a longer and more considered disagreement. A retort could be defensive and wrong or it could be sharp and insightful - it doesn't imply one or the other. A rebuttal is mostly an attempt to correct something while a retort doesn't need to be a correction (although it could).
Even something like "piss off!" could be a retort, but usually never a rebuttal :)
Just as I was reading your comment I remembered that Samuel Jackson used "retort" in his speech in the "Pulp Fiction" movie and was wondering whether he was openly antagonistic there (I mean, he killed a bunch of guys with a pistol shortly afterwards but still) or was it a witticism.
I admit I am lost on these nuances and I usually kind of use whatever idiom comes to mind, which yes, likely would net me some weird looks depending on where I am geographically.
So human language will improve and become more precise? I'm all for it, especially if we get more emojis in speech! Why is that sadly? Humans will learn to imitate their more intelligent betters.
There was already evidence last year[1] that pointed to ChatGPT-specific words like "meticulous," "delve," etc becoming more frequently used than they were previously. The linked study used audio of academic talks and podcasts to determine this.
Part of me wanted to object to those two examples, which I’ve used frequently since the reaching adulthood in the 80s. Another part of me has been triggered by an apparent uptick in the word “crisp”, which my gut takes as an coding-LLM tell.
Opus 4.7 loves to use the word “substrate” whenever it gets the chance, it’s a really weird tic. How do these models end up this these sorts of behaviors?
"English is not my native language and LLMs taught me quite a few very useful formalisms that do land well for people and they change their attitude towards you to be more respectful afterwards. It also showed me how to frame and reframe certain arguments. I agree sounding like an LLM is kind of sad but I am getting a lot of educational value -- and with time I'll sneak my own voice back in these newly learned idioms and ways to talk."