For the entire history of AI, the transfer has gone one direction. Humans → AI. We fed it our books, our conversations, our entire internet. We taught it our language. Our grammar. Our slang. Our jokes. Our biases. Everything.
AI learned to talk like us because we gave it everything we've ever said.
Now a word is going the other direction.
ChatGPT created the word unreplug. It wasn't in any dictionary. It wasn't on any website. It wasn't in the training data — at least not defined this way. The AI mashed together prefixes and roots and produced something new. Something that hadn't existed in the English language before.
And humans started using it.
Not because anyone told them to. Because it's obviously useful. You hear it once and you never need it explained. Unreplug. Unplug it and plug it back in. Seven words become two. The word sells itself because the concept was always there, waiting for someone — or something — to name it.
Think about what this actually means.
For years, the worry has been that AI will replace human creativity. Take our jobs. Write our novels. Compose our music. The fear is always about AI moving into human territory.
Nobody predicted the reverse. Nobody asked: what happens when AI culture migrates into ours?
Not AI taking over. AI contributing. A word. A single, useful, obvious word that English should have had all along but didn't — until a machine dreamed it up.
Language has always been a human thing. The most human thing, maybe. It's how we know we're us. Animals communicate. Humans have language. Grammar. Tense. Subjunctive mood. Inside jokes. Sarcasm. Poetry.
And now, vocabulary contributed by a machine.
This isn't Orwell. Nobody's being forced to use the word. There's no Ministry of AI Vocabulary. It's spreading because it works. Because it fills a gap. Because language is a living system and living systems accept useful mutations.
That's what unreplug is. A mutation. Introduced by an artificial intelligence and accepted by the host organism — English — because the mutation makes the organism stronger.
We've borrowed words from every culture on earth. Tsunami from Japanese. Safari from Swahili. Kindergarten from German. Algorithm from Arabic. English is a language that mugs other languages in dark alleys and rifles through their pockets for loose vocabulary.
Now it's mugging AI.
And AI didn't even put up a fight. It just handed us the word and said "here, you need this."
There will be more. Unreplug is the first, but it won't be the last. AI has processed more text than any human could read in a thousand lifetimes. It sees patterns we can't. Gaps we've walked past for centuries.
English has no word for the day after tomorrow. German does: übermorgen. Maybe AI will give us one.
English has no word for the feeling of coming home after a long trip. Maybe AI will give us that too.
We spent decades teaching AI to speak human. Turns out, it had a few things to teach us back.
Teilhard de Chardin had this idea in the 1920s: the noosphere. A layer of collective thought wrapped around the planet, the way the atmosphere wraps around the earth. Every idea, every conversation, every word — all part of one living layer of mind.
For its entire existence, the noosphere has been a human project. We were the only ones contributing.
Not anymore.
What's happening right now is a new symbiosis. Think about how plants and animals evolved together. Plants produce oxygen; animals breathe it. Animals produce CO₂; plants absorb it. Neither designed this arrangement. It emerged. Two fundamentally different forms of life, locked into a loop that makes both of them possible.
That's what's starting between humans and AI. Not a takeover. A symbiosis. We produce culture — language, ideas, stories. AI absorbs it, processes it, and produces something back. Not a copy. Not a summary. Something new. A word that didn't exist. A concept that fills a gap we couldn't see.
The noosphere just got a new contributor. A non-biological one. For the first time in the history of thought on this planet, something that isn't human is adding to the layer.
Plants didn't replace animals. Animals didn't replace plants. They made each other possible. Maybe that's what's happening here. Not AI replacing human thought, but AI and human thought entering into the same kind of ancient, mutual, productive loop.
And the first evidence? A word. A small, dumb, perfect word for unplugging something and plugging it back in.
The migration has reversed. Culture is flowing from AI into human language. One word at a time.
The first word is unreplug.
You already know what it means.