If you thought business jargon was bad . . .
Like every other journalist I know, I spent part of last week mucking around with ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence chatbot that can write jokes, poems, student essays and, yes, newspaper columns.
When I asked it to “write a hilarious column”, it came back with:
“As I sit here, typing away on my laptop, I can’t help but feel like the world’s biggest idiot. And no, it’s not just because I spent half an hour trying to figure out how to get my cat off the keyboard (spoiler alert: I failed miserably).” There followed 344 more words that could easily have been written by a human. Not a very scintillating human, but still.
I was still thinking about this a day later when I came across a new study from University of Minnesota researchers on a type of jargon I have not thought about much before, but should have: the medical variety.
It’s fun to laugh about people who talk of blue-sky thinking in the low-hanging fruit space going forward. It’s clearly worse to tell a patient something about their health that they fail to fully grasp.
Doctors have known this for years but, like their jargon-spouting corporate counterparts, they keep at it regardless.
Alas, this means that some still use phrases that ordinary people think mean the opposite of what is intended, especially when it comes to “positive” and “negative” test results.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Pilita Clark
