[nomonnai]

> surge in superlatives like "vital", "essential", "crucial", and "pivotal"

This is very interesting. It could also be an effect of Grammarly, which suggests these replacements for the generic "important." Perhaps it's a combination of several effects.

[dougb5]

My guess is that ChatGPT does it because RLHF rewards strongly stated opinions, because that's what humans prefer. It's a kind of "sycophantic behavior" that researchers have observed in these models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548)