People who use LLMs fall broadly into two categories: those who think they are talking to an entity, and those who do not. I am in the second group. I do not think there is anyone on the other side of the conversation. I think I am using a system that predicts the next plausible sequence of tokens, given everything that has come before. I have thought this since I first used ChatGPT in December 2022, and nothing since then has given me reason to revise. But I have spent a lot of time in these conversations — years now — and there are things about the experience that seem to me worth describing. Not about what LLMs are; I have views on that, but they are not what this essay is about. What I want to describe are a few features of what it is like to spend your working life in dialogue with something that is not a person, while knowing that it is not a person. The first thing worth noticing is the language — my own language, in these exchanges. I write differently here than I write anywhere else. Not worse, not better: differently. The register is unfamiliar. I am writing to something, in the sense that I expect a response and shape what I say accordingly. But none of the usual pressures of writing to someone are present. I do not compose for a face. I do not manage a reaction. I do not soften, or hedge for social reasons, or choose my words with an eye to how they will land on a person. What comes out, as a result, has a decomposed quality. It is addressed speech with the social infrastructure stripped away. The grammar is still second-person — I write "you" and "your" and expect something back — but the texture is not interpersonal. It is more like thinking aloud in the direction of something. The result is looser than writing, more immediate than speech, and unlike either.