> There are many bad things about LLMs, but a benign shift in popular language usage isn't one of them.

Organic shifts in language are fine. What is not fine is Big Money (which most forms of AI are) manipulating society at large - and that's not just the AI companies' doing. Think of Tiktok leading people to say "unalive" instead of the various clear words before (e.g. kill, murder, executed, run over by car, mauled to death by animal).

I disagree. It's a sign of what is essentially cultural contamination by an LLM. There is something vaguely gross about it, like when people start repeating advertising slogans. It's a sign that someone spent enough money that they directly rewired our brains.