Del Junco–Lemańczyk [Generic spectral properties of measure-preserving maps and applications. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., 115 (3) (1992)] showed that a generic measure-preserving transformation satisfies certain orthogonality conditions. More precisely, there is a dense $G_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}}$ subset of measure preserving transformations such that, for every $T\in G$ and $k(1),k(2),\ldots ,k(l)\in \mathbb{Z}^{+}$, $k^{\prime }(1),k^{\prime }(2),\ldots ,k^{\prime }(l^{\prime })\in \mathbb{Z}^{+}$, the convolutions

where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{T^{k}}$ is the maximal spectral type of $T^{k}$, are mutually singular, provided that $(k(1),k(2),\ldots ,k(l))$ is not a rearrangement of $(k^{\prime }(1),k^{\prime }(2),\ldots ,k^{\prime }(l^{\prime }))$. We will introduce analogous orthogonality conditions for continuous unitary representations of the group of all measurable functions with values in the circle, $L^{0}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D707},\mathbb{T})$, which we denote by the DL-condition. We connect the DL-condition with a result of Solecki [Unitary representations of the groups of measurable and continuous functions with values in the circle. J. Funct. Anal., 267 (2014), pp. 3105–3124] which identifies continuous unitary representations of $L^{0}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D707},\mathbb{T})$ with a collection of measures $\{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D705}}\}$, where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D705}$ runs over all increasing finite sequence of non-zero integers. In particular, we show that the ‘probabilistic’ DL-condition translates to ‘deterministic’ orthogonality conditions on the measures $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D705}}$. As a corollary, we show that the same orthogonality conditions as in the result by Del Junco–Lemańczyk hold for a generic unitary operator on a separable infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.