It’s not you. It was them.
How twenty-plus years of bad technology taught you to talk like a robot — and why that’s worth unlearning.
At some point in the last two-plus decades, without anyone asking your permission, you were trained.
Not formally. Not consciously. Just gradually, interaction by interaction, frustration by frustration, until the training was complete and you didn’t even notice it had happened.
You learned to talk to technology in short, flat, lifeless phrases. Keywords without context. Requests without explanation. The bare minimum of human expression, stripped of everything that makes communication actually work — because the machines on the other end had no use for the rest of it.
And now there’s a new kind of machine. One that actually wants the rest of it. One that responds better the more human you are with it.
And you’re still typing three words and a question mark.
That’s not your fault. But it is your problem to solve.
How it happened
Think about what technology has asked of you over the last twenty years.
The IVR that answered your call with a list of numbered options: press 1 for billing, press 2 for technical support - and disconnected you if you said anything it didn’t recognise. The website chatbot that offered you four suggested responses because the people who built it knew that if they let you speak freely, the system would fall over. The Google search bar that rewarded you for brevity and punished you for nuance - three sharp keywords returned results; a full sentence returned garbage.
Every one of these interactions was a small lesson. Say less. Be precise. Use the right words in the right order or you won’t get what you need. Don’t ramble. Don’t explain. Don’t be human about it.
And underneath all of those lessons, quieter and more corrosive: the machine doesn’t care who you are. It only cares whether you’ve phrased it correctly.
We learned. Of course we learned. We’re not stupid. We adapted to what the technology required of us, because the alternative was being stuck on hold for forty minutes or getting a page of search results that had nothing to do with what we actually needed.
But something was lost in the adaptation. The habit of explaining ourselves. The instinct to give context. The simple human practice of saying here’s what’s going on, here’s what I need, here’s why it matters — because that’s how you talk to someone who’s actually listening.
The resentment that built quietly
There’s something else worth naming here, because it sits underneath a lot of people’s wariness about AI and it deserves to be said plainly.
The replacement of humans by technology — in call centres, on help desks, across customer service lines that used to be answered by a person and now route you through a labyrinth of automated options — that wasn’t painless. People noticed. People minded.
Not just the people whose jobs disappeared, though that mattered enormously. The people on the other end of the line too. The ones who just needed help and found themselves shouting ”SUPERVISOR” into a phone that kept mishearing them. The ones who spent twenty minutes navigating a chatbot that couldn’t answer their question but also wouldn’t let them through to someone who could.
That experience left a residue. A low-level wariness. A reasonable, earned suspicion that when technology presents itself as helpful, what it usually means is: helpful on its terms, in its language, within its limitations — and good luck to you if your situation doesn’t fit the script.
So when a new kind of AI arrived and people said I don’t trust it or it’s not for me - that wasn’t irrational. That was experience talking. Decades of being asked to shrink themselves to fit a system that was never really designed around them.
The new thing has to earn a different response. And it can. But it helps to understand why the wariness is there in the first place.
What this one actually wants from you
Here’s where this AI is genuinely different — and I want to be specific, because vague reassurance isn’t useful.
The large language models — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, the whole generation of conversational AI that arrived in the last few years — were not built to respond to keywords. They were built to respond to *language*. Full sentences. Context. The rambling explanation that arrives before you’ve worked out exactly what you’re asking. The ”I’m not quite sure how to put this, but...” that turns out to contain exactly the information they need.
The more you sound like yourself, the better they work.
This is not a minor difference from the IVR and the search bar and the chatbot with its four suggested responses. It is a fundamental reversal. For the first time in twenty years, the technology is asking you to stop adapting to it — and just talk.
Which sounds simple. And would be simple, except that you’ve spent twenty years learning to do the opposite.
The re-introduction
The AI doesn’t know you yet. That’s not an accusation — it’s just a fact. Every conversation starts fresh. It doesn’t know how you think, what you’re working on, what matters to you, or how you like to communicate. It knows nothing about you except what you bring into the room.
So bring yourself into the room.
Not the keyword version. Not the three-word search query. Not the formally phrased request designed to satisfy a system that was never really listening anyway.
The actual you. The one with context and history and a specific situation and a reason why this particular thing matters right now. The one who says “here’s what’s going on” before they say “here’s what I need.”
That version of you is the one this technology was built for. You’ve been waiting for a machine that could actually handle you.
Turns out, this might be it.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.