It speaks our language. That's the trap.
Australia's in the World Cup, and the games are on at a ridiculous hour over here. So the whole country has a decision to make. Chuck a sickie and watch, or do the responsible thing and stream it at your desk with the sound off.
I heard that on the news yesterday and had to ask someone what a sickie was. Calling in sick. With a wink.
I speak English. They speak English. And yet...
A few days before that, someone described two blokes having a proper argy-bargy. I nodded like I knew. I did not know. Turns out it's an argument. A barney, a stoush. (See, now I'm just showing off.)
Here's what the slang keeps teaching me. Sharing a language is not the same as being fluent in it. The words land. The meaning sometimes slips straight past.
Which brings me to AI, because of course it does.
AI speaks our language. Fluently. It writes like us, answers like us, sounds like one of us. And that is exactly the trap. Because it talks like a colleague, we treat it like one. We read the output; it sounds right, so we use it.
But sounding right and being right are not the same thing. Ask anyone who's nodded along to slang they didn't understand.
The skill isn't in getting AI to talk. It already does that. The skill is in the gap. Knowing what to hand it and what to hold back. Catching the fluent answer that's quietly wrong. Hearing a confident, polished sentence and asking the only question that matters. Is this right, or does it just sound right?
That's the whole discipline. Fluency reads as judgment, and it isn't. The surface is so familiar that it lulls you into trusting it.
Learning the language underneath is the work. It's most of what I build for these days. Because a change message that sounds right and isn't doesn't cost you a wrong coffee order. It goes out to ten thousand people before anyone catches it.
I'll still nod along when the slang gets away from me if I don't have an opportunity to stop and ask. No harm in it. With AI, I broke that habit early and on purpose.
If you want a place to start closing that gap, the Change Communication Audit is free.