Can prompting ChatGPT make us better communicators?

There are benefits to learning how to prompt AI tools like ChatGPT well. But some things can't be replicated. What do we lose?

- Nicole Chan

Most of us didn't grow up thinking we'd spend a few hours every day talking to a robot. But here we are, in 2025, and millions of us now write daily messages, not just to colleagues or friends, but to large language models (LLMs) with names like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.

We use them to write tricky e-mails, draft CVs, clarify economic jargon, and sometimes, just to feel a little less alone.

In the early days, prompts were often vague or overly broad, such as "Tell me a fun fact". And the tools matched that simplicity: early chatbots like Eliza responded with generic, surface-level replies that barely scratched the creative potential users were hoping for.

But as the technology evolved into more powerful models like GPT-4 and other advanced LLMs, prompts became more nuanced, contextual and goal-oriented.

Today, the prompt is no longer just a tech skill, but a form of communication literacy.

It's not about getting better answers, but asking better questions. It's about figuring out what you really want to say, how to say it clearly, and anticipating how your words will land — on both human and machine ears.

And in that sense, AI might not just be shaping our communication for us, it might be teaching us to be better communicators ourselves.

As a linguist, I can see how language has always evolved alongside our tools, from the printing press to the typewriter to SMS lingo. LLMs are simply the latest and most responsive addition.

But unlike the tools that came before, these talk back. And the way we talk to them will influence more than just our writing. It will shape our thought patterns, our social instincts and even our capacity for empathy.

MAKING LANGUAGE WORK BETTER