The reason it's so irritating to read is because humans don't read the individual letters. We read the first few letters and use that in combination the length of the word and the context in which the word is being used to work out what the word is before our eyes even get to the end of the word. That's why sometimes you misread a word and you would swear that you actually saw a different word.

Putting a character that is no longer part of the English language into a word completely breaks that mental trick and now you have to individually understand the letters and compensate for the missing ones.

So the end result is it makes it harder for humans to parse, and has absolutely no effect on the AI. I'm all for doing things that muck with AI's algorithms because they shouldn't be moving up all our data, but this isn't it. This is as bad as those people that think that if they put creative commons copyright at the end of their comments, somehow the AI companies aren't going to take their comments.