"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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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...
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.
"""
Some of this just makes me sad. Em-dashes can be useful. Three examples is my favorite number of examples to give, and it has been since long before ChatGPT. And grammar mistakes are painful! Why does it have to be this way?
This is a lot better than reading a note to remind you to recite ridiculous white genocide in South Africa conspiracy theories every time you engage in a conversation.
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.
I understand people being paranoid about this, but just understand that the people who will judge you for spelling errors will always dwarf the ones who believe they are capable of sniffing LLMs out...
Same. Also, when asked for anonymity at work, I usually make mistakes that do not correspond to my native tongue (let’s say I’m french and working in an international company. I would write comments in a supposedly anonymous survey like “He ist like…” to camouflage myself as german).
It’s so easy to trick everyone. People who doesn’t do that is just too lazy.
In slack, you cannot just copy paste a two-paragraph answer directly from chatgpt if you’re answering a colleague. They will see that you’re typing an answer and suddenly 1 sec later you sent tons of text.
It’s common sense.
> I would write comments in a supposedly anonymous survey like “He ist like…” to camouflage myself as german
Do actual Germans ever make that kind of mistake though?
I’ve only ever seen “ist” used “wrongly” in that particular way by English speakers, for example in a blog post title that they want to remain completely legible to other English speakers while also trying to make it look like something German as a reference or a joke.
The only situation I could imagine where a German would accidentally put “ist” instead of “is”, is if they were typing on their phone and accidentally or unknowingly had language set to German and their phone autocorrected it.
Sometimes you get weird small things like that on some phones where the phone has “learned” to add most English words to the dictionary or is trying to intelligently recognise that the language being written is not matching the chosen language, but it still autocorrects some words to something else from the chosen language.
But I assume that when people fill out forms for work, they are typing on the work computer and not from their phone.
You can actually just ask ChatGPT to do that. Just say throw in some spelling mistakes, make some nouns all lowercase and double space after some periods etc.
> 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.
Nope. These are all useful words. Anyone who thinks AI is needed to produce something with these words is probably not worth communicating with. I use the word “meticulous” all the time, and “strategically” is an extremely common word.
You should be thankful for the AI “accusers”; most of us will just assume you used the slop machine and stop reading whatever you wrote without wasting our breath telling you about it.
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.
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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.
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!
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tkgally&next=3380763...
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.
Once I started self-publishing in the 1990s, I disregarded her opinion.
Dead Comment
It really made me uneasy, to think that formal communication might start getting side looks.
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.
Can't it also be evidence that more and more writing is LLM generated?
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.
It saves time but it means people have to say when they don't understand and some find that too much of a challenge.
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.
Didn’t realise Tolkien used ChatGPT way back when. What a hack.
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.
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.
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)
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> .. analyzed 22.1 million words from unscripted and spontaneous spoken language including conversational podcasts on science and technology.
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...
I think that offense in school would be tagged "poor grammar".
Otherwise the audience is yourself. If you confuse your own work as being created by AI, uh…
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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.
""" 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. """
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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.
It’s so easy to trick everyone. People who doesn’t do that is just too lazy. In slack, you cannot just copy paste a two-paragraph answer directly from chatgpt if you’re answering a colleague. They will see that you’re typing an answer and suddenly 1 sec later you sent tons of text. It’s common sense.
Do actual Germans ever make that kind of mistake though?
I’ve only ever seen “ist” used “wrongly” in that particular way by English speakers, for example in a blog post title that they want to remain completely legible to other English speakers while also trying to make it look like something German as a reference or a joke.
The only situation I could imagine where a German would accidentally put “ist” instead of “is”, is if they were typing on their phone and accidentally or unknowingly had language set to German and their phone autocorrected it.
Sometimes you get weird small things like that on some phones where the phone has “learned” to add most English words to the dictionary or is trying to intelligently recognise that the language being written is not matching the chosen language, but it still autocorrects some words to something else from the chosen language.
But I assume that when people fill out forms for work, they are typing on the work computer and not from their phone.
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Okay everybody, add these to your list of words you can't use to avoid the trigger-happy AI accusers.
From what I've seen, the people who jump to hasty conclusions about AI use mostly do it when they disagree with the content.
When the writing matches what they want to see, their AI detector sensitivity goes way down.
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.
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.