[milancurcic]

"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.

[diego_sandoval]

Same thing as with em dashes. Some of us have been using em dashes from before ChatGPT.

[jijijijij]

Funny enough, I avoided the em dash, because everyone was using hyphens and I didn't want forensic linguistics bored. Now that AI got my FBI agents on welfare and em dashed the internet kaputt, now that I am liberated, I can't tell an em dash and hyphen apart, hand–written in my diary.

[Taek]

Genuine question, do you actually use the formal emdash in your writing? AIs are very consistent about using the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it, whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it. That's because most keyboards don't have an emdash key, and few people even know how to produce an actual emdash.

That's what makes it such a good giveaway. I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong, and that you do actually use the proper double long dash in your writing, but I'm guessing that you actually use the human slang for an emdash, which is visually different and easily sets your writing apart as not AI writing!

[tkgally]

Fortunately, em-dash users who have been posting to HN long enough can point to evidence of our pre-ChatGPT use:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tkgally&next=3380763...

[Fade_Dance]

Unfortunately the em dash has already been relegated to the dungeon of AI suspicion for the next 5-10 years.

[CPLX]

For both of these examples who the fuck cares. I just evaluate AI writing people send me the same as any writing.

If they’re using AI to speed things up and deliver really clear and on point documents faster then great. If they can’t stand behind what they’re saying I will call them out.

I get AI written stuff from team members all the time. When it’s bad and is a waste of my time I just hit reply and say don’t do this.

But I’ve trained many people to use AI effectively and often with some help they can produce way better SOPs or client memos or whatever else.

It’s just a tool. It’s like getting mad someone used spell check. Which by the way, people used to actually argue back in the 80’s. Oh no we killed spelling bees what a lost tradition.

This conversation has been going on as long as I’ve been using tech which is about 4 decades.

[CurtMonash]

My English professor criticized me for allegedly excessive use of em dashes in 1973.

Once I started self-publishing in the 1990s, I disregarded her opinion.

[Jepacor]

I think it's easier to just stop using em dashes, as much as I like them. People have latched on to this because it works a good amount of the time, so I don't think they will stop. I don't even think they should stop, because, well, it works a good amount of the time.

[HaZeust]

No one uses em dashes with no space between the separating letters at the beginning and end of one, though - like GPT does.

[zavertnik]

Same here. Easily one of the worst parts of AI in my personal life. They don't even know about en dashes :(

[Angostura]

The article also uses M dashes

[kaptainscarlet]

I picked up emdash from quora, back when it used to have good writers.

[WithinReason]

So it was you who got it into the training set!

[guelo]

I just went through your HN comment history going back to 2021 and didn't find a single —

[kace91]

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.

[cosmic_cheese]

What’s worse is that this window might shift as writing becomes less formal and new material is included in the training corpus. By 2035 any language above a first grade reading level will be grounds for AI suspicion.

[bonoboTP]

Whenever there are commonly agreed upon and known tell-tale signs of AI writing, the model creators can just retrain to eliminate those cues. On an individual level, you can also try to put it in your personalization prompt what turns of phrase to avoid (but central retraining is better).

This will be a cat and mouse game. Content factories will want models that don't create suspicious output, and the reading public will develop new heuristics to detect it. But it will be a shifting landscape. Currently, informal writing is rare in AI generation because most people ask models to improve their formulations, with more sophisticated vocabulary etc. Often non-native speakers, who then don't exactly notice the over-pompousness, just that it looks to them like good writing.

Usually there are also deeper cues, closer to the content's tone. AI writing often lacks the sharp edge, when you unapologetically put a thought there on the table. The models are more weasely, conflict-avoidant and hold a kind of averaged, blurred millennial Reddit-brained value system.

[viccis]

Words like that were banned in my English classes for being empty verbiage. It's a good policy even if it seems like a silly purpose. "Therefore" is clumsy and heavy handed in most settings.

[jazzypants]

"The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep." - Saruman, 2002

[dgfitz]

"The Dwarves tell no tale; but even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also it was their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled, Durin's Bane" - J.R.R. Tolkien spoken by Gandalf, 1954

[jujube3]

Saruman definitely seems like the kind to use AI.

[jowea]

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.

[wahnfrieden]

That's what they said. You've rephrased it

[lelanthran]

> 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.

Can't it also be evidence that more and more writing is LLM generated?

[userbinator]

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.

[HKH2]

The opposite is someone who is trying to tell you something but assumes you already know what they're trying to tell you and that you will ask questions if you don't understand.

It saves time but it means people have to say when they don't understand and some find that too much of a challenge.

[heelix]

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.

[jstummbillig]

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.

[lo_zamoyski]

I refuse to change my writing style to keep people from assuming it's AI-generated!

[Terr_]

Or when on Windows, alt-0151.

[hliyan]

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.

[xhevahir]

Those are not superlatives.

[vasco]

It's funny because if people didn't use it alot prior to LLM hype, the LLMs wouldn't use it either.

[andy99]

Orwell wrote about using metaphors (of which delve is one)

  Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 

At this point it's irrelevant of you're using AI or not, these words have become cliché and so don't belong in good writing.

[testdelacc1]

> 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.

[wiredfool]

And Tom Stoppard with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

[gosub100]

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.

[rz2k]

Since reading The Mac is not a Typrewriter in the 1990s, I've been using em-dashes, but I actively avoid using them now.

[Dwedit]

Any Magic player during Innistrad would be quite familiar with the word "Delve".

[tamimio]

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.

[bongodongobob]

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.

[nozzlegear]

I play WoW daily and this is what I always think of when someone brings up the word "delve". It's unclear if Brann would summon more or less nerubians if he were piloted by ChatGPT though.

[wink]

And it's not even the first MMO to prominently use that word. Although a much bigger target audience with WoW (it's a region in EVE Online)

[lo_zamoyski]

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.

[bonoboTP]

> In the "opinion" of ChatGPT, my style of writing is "academic".

It may simply be glazing. If you ask it to estimate your IQ (if it complies), it will likely say >130 regardless of what you actually wrote. RLHF taught it that users like being praised.

[lupusreal]

ChatGPT says that my writing is "analytical and precise" but I'm fucking retarded.

[JumpCrisscross]

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.

[guessmyname]

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.

“Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?!” — Sofia Vergara (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t34JMTy0gxs)

[fcoury]

Yup, can confirm. I am not a native English speaker and I've used delve for a long time as well.

[bdangubic]

I delved for something wrong with this comment and came up empty :)

[rajnathani]

Also tl;dr about their method of analysis (as they cannot use text, as that could be GenAI text copy-pasted):

> .. analyzed 22.1 million words from unscripted and spontaneous spoken language including conversational podcasts on science and technology.

[tpoacher]

Sounds intricate

[jgalt212]

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).

[dragonwriter]

The thing is virtually every single thing that gets presented as an "AI tell" is just "a word, punctuation mark, or pattern of presenting information more common in a training set which includes a high volume of formal writing and professional presentations than it is in the experience of people whose reading and writing is mostly limited to social media and low-effort listicle-level online 'journalism'."

So, yeah, if your target audience are the people who take those "AI tells" seriously and negatively react to them, definitely craft your writing to that audience. But also, consider if that is really your target audience...

[HumanOstrich]

> but if you know you're audience

I think that offense in school would be tagged "poor grammar".

[9rx]

What audience is willing to pay for what you write, but also not recognize you and easily dismiss your work as “AI slop”?

Otherwise the audience is yourself. If you confuse your own work as being created by AI, uh…

[dingnuts]

I'm not sure someone with a handle that references Ayn Rand's second most boring book has a right to comment on word choice lol

[booleandilemma]

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.

[techpineapple]

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.

[mathiaspoint]

People who used "delve" before ChatGPT felt like robots anyway so I don't treat them any differently now than I used to.