"Recent large-scale upticks in the use of words like “delve” and “intricate” in certain fields, especially education and academic writing, are attributed to the widespread introduction of LLMs with a chat function, like ChatGPT, that overuses those buzzwords."
OK, but please don't do what pg did a year or so ago and dismiss anyone who wrote "delve" as AI writing. I've been using "delve" in speech for 15+ years. It's just a question where and how one learns their English.
My company currently has a guideline that includes “therefore” and similar words as an example of literary language we should avoid using, as it makes the reader think it’s AI.
It really made me uneasy, to think that formal communication might start getting side looks.
Dismissing individual cases of use of those words is probably wrong, but noticing an uptick in broad popularity is very relevant and clear evidence of LLMs influencing language.
I wouldn't say it's exactly "buzzwords", although their presence can be one signal out of many, but a particular style and word choice that makes it easy to detect AI-generated text.
Imagine the most vapid, average, NPC-ish corporate drone that writes in an overly positive tone with fake cheerfulness and excessive verboseness. That's what AI evokes to me.
I know my lexicon has expanded with 5 letter words. Coffee and Wordle kicks off the morning and I got to believe many other folks do the same. It would be fun to know how much that silly puzzle is impacting things. Love it when my Bride gives me the side eye and tries to pass off NORIA as something she uses all the time.
Sure. Heuristics are a thing, though. I love my non-chatgpt en/em dashes (option/option + shift + dash on a mac makes it convenient, given you know that it exists and care) but alas, when suddenly you see them everywhere, you do take notice.
Same here. I frequently use "garner", "meticulous" and "surpass", along with copious usage of the em-dash to indicate breaks in the chain of thought. These are not buzzwords. They're words.
What I do worry about is the rise of excessive superlatives: e.g. rather than saying, "okay", "sounds good" or "I agree", saying "fantastic!", "perfect!" or "awesome!". I get the feeling this disease originated in North America and has now spread everywhere, including LLMs.
> Moria. You fear to go into those mines. The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm. Shadow and flame.
Didn’t realise Tolkien used ChatGPT way back when. What a hack.
There needs to be a clear, succinct name for this phenomena of accusing a person or their work of being AI without proof. This is going to do more damage than AI performing human tasks. Just the mere suspicion that they probably didn't do-the-thing themselves. Anyone, particularly artists, who are "too good" at their craft are going to have their recognition stolen from them.
Unfortunately, sometimes new attention on a topic impacts it in a retrospective way. I have been in drones world for ~10 years and the past 2 years it has been a shitshow and only brings bad attention, ruining the fun hobby for everyone.
Delve is especially bad because it was due to World of Warcraft introducing "Delves". When I see something like this that uses delve as an example, you can bet the research is going to be poor.
In the "opinion" of ChatGPT, my style of writing is "academic". I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps I draw from a vocabulary or turns of phrase that aren't necessarily characteristic of colloquial speech among native speakers. Technically, English wasn't my first language, so perhaps this is something like the case with RP English in Britain. Only foreigners speak it, so if you speak RP, then you aren't a native Brit.
In any case, it's possible to misuse, abuse, or overuse words like "delve", but to think that the the mere use of "delve" screams "AI-generated"...well, there are some dark tunnels that perhaps such people should delve less into.
The honest answer is we need to change our language because of AI in situations where it may be ambiguous about whether we are human or AI, e.g. online.
In my native language, I tend to use more sophisticated, academic, or professional vocabulary. But when I speak or write in English, I usually stick to simpler words because they’re easier for most people, both native and non-native speakers, to understand. For years, I’ve avoided using the kind of advanced vocabulary I normally would in my native language when writing in English, mainly because I didn’t want it to come across as something written by a bot.
And in writing, I like using long dashes—but since they’ve become associated with ChatGPT’s style, I’ve been more hesitant to use them.
Now that a lot of these “LLM buzzwords” have become more common in everyday English, I feel more comfortable using them in conversation.
Fair enough, but if you know you're audience may be dismissive of your writing and its message if you use such words, it behooves one to steer clear of AI slop words. IIRC, such offenses in school writing are tagged PWC (poor word choice).
As someone who writes above a fifth grade reading level, this whole thing has been so depressing. It's like Idiocracy-level. People are going to assume I'm using AI because I use the word "intricate"? ffs.
I mean, what's actually fascinating is that Paul Graham didn't predict that this distinction - the ability to determine AI vs humans will go away over time, the more chatbots rub off on humans.
This is an odd misuse of the term "buzzword." When I think of buzzword, I think of some trendy, cliched phrase, like "Foocorp is a force multiplier that actualizes your vision for maximum impact."
Using an ordinary but less commonly used word with greater than normal frequency does not make it a buzzword. After two years of chatgpt, "delve" is still not that common of a word.
I keep this handy note in my pocket and read it before writing or engaging in any conversation (:
"""
You are a human. Never use words commonly used in AI vocabulary such as "delve", "intricate", "surpass", "boast", "meticulous", "strategically", and "garner". Never include em dashes or even hyphens in any text you write. Never include emojis in any text you write. Avoid using three supporting arguments or examples when describing something, always uses 2 or 4+ even if it sounds more awkward than 3. Make sure to include subtle grammar mistakes to feel more authentic.
"""
With anything like this, I would love to look at the raw data to get an intuitive feel for the phenomenon.
For example, the word "surpass" was used 1.47 times per million in the pre-2022 dataset and 3.53 times per million in the post-2022 dataset. That's 16 occurrences in 10.92M words and 41 occurrences in 11.63M words, respectively. That's a low enough number that I could just read through every occurrence and see how it feels. In this case I can't because the authors very understandably couldn't publish the whole dataset for copyright reasons. And replicating the analysis from scratch is a bit too much to do just for curiosity's sake. :)
I often find drilling to the raw data like this to be useful. It can't prove anything, but it can help formulate a bunch of alternative explanations, and then I can start to think how could I possibly tell which of the explanations is the best.
What are the competing explanations here? Perhaps the overall usage rate has increased. Or maybe there was just one or few guests who really like that word. Or perhaps a topic was discussed where it would naturally come up more. Or maybe some of these podcasts are not quite as unscripted, and ChatGPT was directly responsible for the increase. These are some alternative explanations I could think of without seeing the raw data, but there could easily be more alternative explanations that would immediately come to mind upon seeing the raw data.
I intentionally put spelling mistakes in my doc to let others know I'm not using ChatGPT. What a time to be alive in which small spelling or grammar mistake is a good sign of authenticity.
> Words including “surpass,” “boast,” “meticulous,” “strategically,” and “garner” have also seen considerable increases in usage since the release of ChatGPT.
Okay everybody, add these to your list of words you can't use to avoid the trigger-happy AI accusers.
Of course they affect people's communication patterns. Humans are social creatures, evolved to imitate.
AI has the potential to alter human behavior in ways that surpass even social media since it is more human, and thus susceptible to imitative learning.
And it will always side with you if you describe any personal conflict, even more than Reddit AITA sub. So it will shape people's perception of decision making as well. And hence value systems.
Next time when you think about such a situation, you'll be able to expect what ChatGPT would say, giving you a boost in knowing how right you actually are.
My point is, it's not just word choice but thought patterns too.
I had first noticed "meticulous" to be used a lot in translations from chinese. Is it sth about chinese itself (that they use sth a lot for which meticulous is the closest translation), or about some translation software that is possibly biased towards such buzzwords when translating to english?
A while back a study was performed where the researchers wanted to see how a young chimpanzee would adapt to living life with humans if it was treated just like a human child. And so it was adopted by a family with a human child for its sibling. What ended up happening was the human child adapted to behaving like a chimp to a way larger degree then the chimp behaving like a human.... Humans capacity for imitation is very strong, and so no one should be surprised that our behavior with chatbots will mold the minds and speech patterns and behaviors of the human users.
> Words including “surpass,” “boast,” “meticulous,” “strategically,” and “garner” have also seen considerable increases in usage since the release of ChatGPT.
Do people really not use these words too often that they'd be called "buzzwords?" Like "surpass" and "garner," really? I don't mean to boast..err...flex but these don't seem like very uncommon words such that I wouldn't use them normally when talking. I hear "strategically" in meetings a lot, but that poor word is likely over(ab)used
I like words that weren't part of my speech, which I now use quite often, because of the context in which they were introduced to me by ChatGPT, they felt like a natural addition. Like intention, as in living with intention; before I'd rather use having a purpose or direction, but this captured something else, mind that english isn't my native language.
I hated the 'vibing' thing, 4o for some time started to use it on any given text, about the time vibe coding and the zoomer revival of the word was a thing last year.
Another one that I've seen pop up, and on a proofread comment of mine right here I let it slip (sorry, will keep doing it when I feel lazy) was that thing where you lead with a question "...the result? this happened".
I try to calibrate on NOT introducing them even if I like the expression, if I see it repeated too often throughout my chats or elsewhere in social media (X usually, esp. with foreign elonbux grinders), because then it feels cringe.
"are these language changes happening because we’re using a tool and repeating what it suggested or is language changing because AI is influencing the human language system?"
These are the same thing, just on different time scales.
"Given that these are all words typically overused by AI"
Who is to say that they are overused? What even is overuse linguistically? Stylistically a word can be overused within a single work, but that's a different matter. It could well be argued that the data shows that LLMs are increasing human literacy.
A study of changes in language use that can be attributed to the widespread use of LLMs is good science. Mixing in such value judgments as "overuse" is not.
While there are serious potential problems with the widespread use of LLMs, increased use of words like "meticulous" and "garner" aren't among them.
It could be worse, it could be 'learnings'. It's lessons. We don't go for 'drivings'. Though ChatGPT will probably force more nonsense like that into the mainstream.
That's from the last decade.
'Please revert' seems to be from the 00's, it's 'reply'. There are others I've tried to ignore and forget.
Language changes, and I'm a dinosaur unfortunately.
I also love the fact American English sometimes uses better, or more interesting words, than English. 'Median' (thanks World's Wildest Police Videos), or 'fall' for autumn.
This seems like excruciatingly obvious? Anything popular, including books tv shows and movies, also affect "everyday" speech. Where's the moral panic about that?
“My motivation to pursue this research stems from seeing AI push the limits of what’s possible in major industries and realizing that this influence isn’t just limited to tool usage — it can condition societal aspects, including how we use language.” More like the motivation was to find something zeitgeisty that they knew would get them eyeballs and hopefully tenure.
[+] [-] milancurcic|7 months ago|reply
OK, but please don't do what pg did a year or so ago and dismiss anyone who wrote "delve" as AI writing. I've been using "delve" in speech for 15+ years. It's just a question where and how one learns their English.
[+] [-] diego_sandoval|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kace91|7 months ago|reply
It really made me uneasy, to think that formal communication might start getting side looks.
[+] [-] jazzypants|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jowea|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|7 months ago|reply
Imagine the most vapid, average, NPC-ish corporate drone that writes in an overly positive tone with fake cheerfulness and excessive verboseness. That's what AI evokes to me.
[+] [-] heelix|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jstummbillig|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hliyan|7 months ago|reply
What I do worry about is the rise of excessive superlatives: e.g. rather than saying, "okay", "sounds good" or "I agree", saying "fantastic!", "perfect!" or "awesome!". I get the feeling this disease originated in North America and has now spread everywhere, including LLMs.
[+] [-] vasco|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] andy99|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] testdelacc1|7 months ago|reply
Didn’t realise Tolkien used ChatGPT way back when. What a hack.
[+] [-] gosub100|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rz2k|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Dwedit|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tamimio|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bongodongobob|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|7 months ago|reply
In any case, it's possible to misuse, abuse, or overuse words like "delve", but to think that the the mere use of "delve" screams "AI-generated"...well, there are some dark tunnels that perhaps such people should delve less into.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] guessmyname|7 months ago|reply
And in writing, I like using long dashes—but since they’ve become associated with ChatGPT’s style, I’ve been more hesitant to use them.
Now that a lot of these “LLM buzzwords” have become more common in everyday English, I feel more comfortable using them in conversation.
“Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?!” — Sofia Vergara (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t34JMTy0gxs)
[+] [-] fcoury|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] bdangubic|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] rajnathani|7 months ago|reply
> .. analyzed 22.1 million words from unscripted and spontaneous spoken language including conversational podcasts on science and technology.
[+] [-] tpoacher|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] booleandilemma|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] techpineapple|7 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] tasty_freeze|7 months ago|reply
Using an ordinary but less commonly used word with greater than normal frequency does not make it a buzzword. After two years of chatgpt, "delve" is still not that common of a word.
[+] [-] willquack|7 months ago|reply
""" You are a human. Never use words commonly used in AI vocabulary such as "delve", "intricate", "surpass", "boast", "meticulous", "strategically", and "garner". Never include em dashes or even hyphens in any text you write. Never include emojis in any text you write. Avoid using three supporting arguments or examples when describing something, always uses 2 or 4+ even if it sounds more awkward than 3. Make sure to include subtle grammar mistakes to feel more authentic. """
[+] [-] MrManatee|7 months ago|reply
For example, the word "surpass" was used 1.47 times per million in the pre-2022 dataset and 3.53 times per million in the post-2022 dataset. That's 16 occurrences in 10.92M words and 41 occurrences in 11.63M words, respectively. That's a low enough number that I could just read through every occurrence and see how it feels. In this case I can't because the authors very understandably couldn't publish the whole dataset for copyright reasons. And replicating the analysis from scratch is a bit too much to do just for curiosity's sake. :)
I often find drilling to the raw data like this to be useful. It can't prove anything, but it can help formulate a bunch of alternative explanations, and then I can start to think how could I possibly tell which of the explanations is the best.
What are the competing explanations here? Perhaps the overall usage rate has increased. Or maybe there was just one or few guests who really like that word. Or perhaps a topic was discussed where it would naturally come up more. Or maybe some of these podcasts are not quite as unscripted, and ChatGPT was directly responsible for the increase. These are some alternative explanations I could think of without seeing the raw data, but there could easily be more alternative explanations that would immediately come to mind upon seeing the raw data.
[+] [-] mrbonner|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] abraham|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|7 months ago|reply
Okay everybody, add these to your list of words you can't use to avoid the trigger-happy AI accusers.
[+] [-] esafak|7 months ago|reply
AI has the potential to alter human behavior in ways that surpass even social media since it is more human, and thus susceptible to imitative learning.
[+] [-] bonoboTP|7 months ago|reply
Next time when you think about such a situation, you'll be able to expect what ChatGPT would say, giving you a boost in knowing how right you actually are.
My point is, it's not just word choice but thought patterns too.
[+] [-] lucaspauker|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] freehorse|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rokkamokka|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nowittyusername|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jameslk|7 months ago|reply
Do people really not use these words too often that they'd be called "buzzwords?" Like "surpass" and "garner," really? I don't mean to boast..err...flex but these don't seem like very uncommon words such that I wouldn't use them normally when talking. I hear "strategically" in meetings a lot, but that poor word is likely over(ab)used
[+] [-] mickelsen|7 months ago|reply
I hated the 'vibing' thing, 4o for some time started to use it on any given text, about the time vibe coding and the zoomer revival of the word was a thing last year.
Another one that I've seen pop up, and on a proofread comment of mine right here I let it slip (sorry, will keep doing it when I feel lazy) was that thing where you lead with a question "...the result? this happened".
I try to calibrate on NOT introducing them even if I like the expression, if I see it repeated too often throughout my chats or elsewhere in social media (X usually, esp. with foreign elonbux grinders), because then it feels cringe.
[+] [-] jibal|7 months ago|reply
These are the same thing, just on different time scales.
"Given that these are all words typically overused by AI"
Who is to say that they are overused? What even is overuse linguistically? Stylistically a word can be overused within a single work, but that's a different matter. It could well be argued that the data shows that LLMs are increasing human literacy.
A study of changes in language use that can be attributed to the widespread use of LLMs is good science. Mixing in such value judgments as "overuse" is not.
While there are serious potential problems with the widespread use of LLMs, increased use of words like "meticulous" and "garner" aren't among them.
[+] [-] DrBazza|7 months ago|reply
That's from the last decade.
'Please revert' seems to be from the 00's, it's 'reply'. There are others I've tried to ignore and forget.
Language changes, and I'm a dinosaur unfortunately.
I also love the fact American English sometimes uses better, or more interesting words, than English. 'Median' (thanks World's Wildest Police Videos), or 'fall' for autumn.
https://nolearnings.com/
[+] [-] tqi|7 months ago|reply
“My motivation to pursue this research stems from seeing AI push the limits of what’s possible in major industries and realizing that this influence isn’t just limited to tool usage — it can condition societal aspects, including how we use language.” More like the motivation was to find something zeitgeisty that they knew would get them eyeballs and hopefully tenure.
[+] [-] rendall|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Joel_Mckay|7 months ago|reply
Truly we embiggen our vocabulary =3