Even CEOs of major AI companies are starting to admit the pitfalls and quirks of the technology.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday said he\u2019s had \u201cthe strangest experience\u201d reading a Reddit thread about Codex, his company\u2019s new agent tool for developers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI assume it\u2019s all fake\/bots, even though in this case I know Codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real,\u201d Altman wrote in a post<\/a> on X<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Reddit thread Altman references is overly positive about OpenAI\u2019s Codex, and even dishes on Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think there are a bunch of things going on,\u201d Altman continued. \u201cReal people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extremely Online crowd drifts together in very correlated ways, the hype cycle has a very \u2018it\u2019s so over\/we\u2019re so back\u2019 extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so I\u2019m extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots).\u201d<\/p>\n OpenAI didn\u2019t immediately respond to Fortune\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n Altman isn\u2019t the first person to unpack the fact people are starting to talk more like AI bots in real life. Hiromu Yakura<\/a>, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, noticed differences in his own vocabulary about a year after ChatGPT debuted in late 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yakura, along with other researchers at the Max Planck Institute, analyzed millions of emails, essays, and other texts, along with hundreds of thousands of YouTube<\/a> videos and podcast episodes and found<\/a> a surge of ChatGPT words\u2014like delve, examine, and explore\u2014in the 18 months following the AI tool\u2019s release.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe patterns that are stored in AI technology seem to be transmitting back to the human mind,\u201d study co-author Levin Brinkmann, also at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, told Scientific American.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another study<\/a> by the University of California-Berkeley found ChatGPT responses reinforce dialect discrimination<\/a>. In other words, ChatGPT favors Standard American English, which can frustrate non-American users. That underlines the notion ChatGPT has a standard way of responding to users, which in turn influences the way they speak and write.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe net effect is somehow AI Twitter\/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn\u2019t a year or two ago,\u201d Altman said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Vaikunthan Rajaratnam, a nerve surgeon and UNESCO chair partner, claimed in a LinkedIn<\/a> article<\/a>, however, he\u2019s been working to reverse engineer ChatGPT to actually sound like him. While he said some of the pros of ChatGPT include enriched vocabulary and grammar and added clarity and structure to communication, \u201cdiminishing authenticity\u201d was a major pitfall as well as loss of regional dialects and personal voice.<\/p>\n \u201cThrough carefully crafted prompts and iterative refinement, I\u2019ve tuned it to reflect my tone, my vocabulary, my way of thinking,\u201d Rajaratnam wrote. \u201cWhen I use it now\u2014whether it\u2019s to draft newsletters, brainstorm, or write academic pieces\u2014it often sounds eerily familiar\u2026 because it sounds like me.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, other executives and billionaires have taken notice of some of the oddities and pitfalls of AI\u2014even if they\u2019re overall relatively keen on the technology. Mark Cuban, former Shark Tank investor and Dallas Mavericks owner, said in a Bluesky post<\/a> this week there\u2019s one thing AI still doesn\u2019t have: humility.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cA little solace for the Anti AI crowd,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe greatest weakness of AI is its inability to say \u2018I don\u2019t know\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur ability to admit what we don\u2019t know will always give humans an advantage,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n