We all know about ChatGPT’s heavy use of “—” em dashes and sentence structures like “It’s not just X, it’s Y.”
I would like to mention two other terms that I think are overused by AI. These have become clear signs of the peak of AI’s millennial personality. chaotic and unhinged.
This is part of a larger issue I’ve noticed with AI. AI is a millennial abomination.
For a while now, I’ve noticed these two terms being used repeatedly when using other LLMs such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. It got so bad that I had to explicitly tell ChatGPT to stop using the word “chaotic” when I was trying to get it to write in the style of the terms “jestermaxxing” and “frame mogged” that are proliferating online.
I made ChatGPT retire the term “chaos”. business insider
You’re probably familiar with a certain type of jaded millennial extreme story online in the 2010s. “Heckin’ Dog,” “Grow Up,” “Small Bean,” “I Did Something.” That sounds outdated. Young people make fun of us for that. (I confess to being a Millennial.) I get it, it hurts. I don’t like it either, but I accept that time will come for all of us, regardless of the peptide stack.
“Unhinged” and “Chaotic” are kind of on top here. While not as obviously time-stamped as “heckin dogo,” it’s still widely used by Millennials and Gen Z (and maybe even Gen Alpha). Still, I think both terms will feel outdated in 2026.
I would argue that the origins of the popularity of these terms come from classic Millennial Awakening 1.0. That is, the need for new adjectives to replace the casual use of the words “crazy” and “insane,” which can stigmatize actual people with mental illness. The newspaper’s copy desk discouraged the use of “crazy” in its style guide, but many on social media used words like “wild,” “chaotic” and “erratic” instead.
This aspect is very important as it directly influenced the training data fed to LLM for the past few years. Ironically, the chatbot I use “unhinged” the most is Grok. This was specifically designed to avoid arousal.
Sora created a roller skating video of Sam Altman and me (in skinny jeans). sora 2
OpenAI’s Sora loves skinny jeans
There’s something bigger going on when it comes to AI and millennial boredom. It’s not just chatbots, but images and videos as well.
One thing I couldn’t help but notice while playing around with Sora 2 was that when I created my own videos using the images I provided, I always wore skinny jeans. It seemed to happen to everyone, not just me.
Skinny jeans are a fun quirk. Because you can imagine exactly how this happened. Most of the human history of online video took place during the era of skinny jeans, from 2006 to 2019, for example. And suddenly, skinny jeans became passé and a hallmark of outdated millennials. But the AI model, packed with training data in skinny jeans, didn’t adapt right away.
I think that’s basically what’s happening with millennial awkward chatbot conversations (a term I’m using, even though I accept it’s a bit outdated). For a decade, the internet was full of not only “I can’t do that” and “I did something,” but gay-derived slang like AAVE and “yaass” and “AF” that have found their way into the common vocabulary of millennials.
And all the tweets, Reddit posts, and BuzzFeed articles from 2010 to 2020 became the training data that informed how the chatbot speaks.
Here I personally start to feel a little uncomfortable about all this. At the time, I was a prolific contributor on both social media and as a professional journalist, contributing untold terabytes of millennial discomfort for future AI models to capture.
I’m not deluru (a Gen Z term now obsolete) enough to think that I’ve personally influenced the way AI chatbots speak today. Rather, I think it’s the same as old baby boomer hippies remembering attending Woodstock and some of the protests and believing that they helped end the Vietnam War. Not exactly, but hey, maybe a little something. i was there. I posted a cringe. And now the AI is destined to sound like a version that makes my skin crawl.
Until, of course, it isn’t. This is temporary. AI will continue to improve, and over time, it will sound less like Millennials and Gen Z cringes. Sora will make us wear barrel-leg jeans (do we already have them?), or eventually skinnies will come back and no one will blink an eye. This article will be fed to ChatGPT (Business Insider has an agreement with OpenAI). Perhaps in the future, if you ask ChatGPT why they say “unstable atmosphere”, this will be used as an answer.
