People have suggested that I am a meat proxy (awesome phrase and concept BTW) before. It's hilarious, mostly…
James W. — Decision Intelligence Executive
People have suggested that I am a meat proxy (awesome phrase and concept BTW) before. It's hilarious, mostly because my biggest crime seems to be using the words "utilize" and "clarity" in casual conversation. But honestly, the evidence is starting to stack up against me.
Words like "leverage," "operationalize," and "alacrity" pop out of my mouth way too often. "Downstream analysis" has even leaked out of my cybersecurity day job and right into my kitchen. I blame more than 15 years of federal government contracting. When you spend that long churning out proposals, reports, and deliverables, you pick up a very specific dialect. Everything has to be actionable, measurable, aligned, and leveraged just to hit some obscure requirement buried on page 37 of an appendix nobody actually read.
Eventually, you don't just write like that, unfortunately you just thinking that way. It's like my brain accepted a weird corporate firmware update and pushed it straight to production and didn't do even a minimum of static code analysis.
My wife has this very specific look she gives me when the kids act up and I catch myself asking them why they didn't conduct a "downstream analysis" before making a bad choice. Apparently, normal parents just call that "possible consequences," who knew?
Being neurodivergent probably doesn't help. I've always loved precision, patterns, and picking that one oddly specific word when a normal one would do just fine. Mix that with years of risk analysis, cyber threats, and executive briefings, and my everyday chatter basically morphed into a ChatGPT prompt written by a bureaucrat.
It’s pretty ironic when you think about it, stressing out about AI learning to sound human, but some of us just end up spending two decades in a career that trained us to sound like machines.
Maybe the trick isn't obsessing over what "sounds like AI" but realizing that our language picks up the quirks of the places we work. Sometimes, a weirdly robotic phrase isn't proof of artificial intelligence but instead demonstrates you wrote way too many federal contracting reports.
Anyway, if you'll excuse me, I need to go operationalize bedtime with greater alacrity. My current stakeholders are showing absolutely zero concern for downstream impacts.
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Roy A.: I hate that the em dash has become guilty by association - AI isn't the only thing capable of using that grammatical instrument!