7 ms·
Delving into ChatGPT usage in academic writing through excess vocabulary
- Retr0id 2y agoIt's also possible that humans are starting to sound more like LLMs too, due to reading (wittingly or otherwise) more LLM output.
- leumassuehtam 2y agoIt's easy to notice, even on this website, when a comment starts with "It's worth noting that...". It sounds very LLM-esque.
- lolc 2y agoI still don't know whether there was an actual increase in comments that start with "You're correct". Maybe it's just me noticing it more after Chatgpt came to prominence with its subservient ways.
- alehlopeh 2y agoTo be fair, that’s not the only way to start a comment to make it sound LLM-esque.
- iLemming 2y agoWhenever I see a comment that talks about programming with the uppercased "S" in "Typescript", "Javascript", "Clojurescript", my immediate guess is that the person used LLM , at least for spellchecking and improving the original text. I predict that soon, LLMs would learn to make tiny, insignificant mistakes, to sound "more human" in writing.
- hju22_-3 2y agoGuess I'll have to stop writing JavaScript and the like then. :/
- uptownfunk 2y agoHa ha at “delving” common gpt language
- lioeters 2y ago> We study vocabulary changes in 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010-2024, and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. "Delving".. Sounds like the authors might have used an LLM while writing this paper as well.
- smelendez 2y agoIt’s a joke. Delve is the first example they show.
- klipt 2y agoI associate the word strongly with Lord of the Rings. "The AI researchers delved too greedily and too deep, and awoke the BaLLMrog."
- throawayjune 2y agoLLMichel Delving
- esafak 2y agoIt's the Voight-Kampff test for LLMs :)
- CJefferson 2y agoThis is clearly a joke in the paper, they mention Delving is on of the words with the biggest frequency increase.
- MattGaiser 2y agoThat’s the joke.
- usef- 2y agoI'm surprised people make such a big deal out of "delving", it doesn't seem rare. Maybe it was less common in the US than elsewhere? (and do I have to deliberately avoid it now, to avoid sounding like AI?)
- refibrillator 2y agoOne confounding factor here is the proliferation of autocorrect and grammar “advisors” in popular apps like gmail etc. One algorithm tweak could change a lot of writing at that scale. While the word frequency stats are damning, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence presented that directly ties the changes to LLMs specifically.
- daemonologist 2y agoI think they address this to some degree by checking different year pairings (end of page 2), where the only excess usage they found was of words related to current events (ebola, coronavirus, etc.) and even then not to the same degree as the 2022-24 pair. It would be interesting to analyze how well a language model is able to predict each abstract. In theory if the text was largely written by a model then a similar model might be able to predict it more accurately than it would a human-written abstract. (Of course the variety of models and frequency at which they're updated makes this more difficult.)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mmoskal 2y agoLLMs used in writing of 1/3 of scientific papers. On the one hand scary, on the other it seems people find them useful. Maybe this AI thing is not like crypto after all...
- rockskon 2y agoIn parts of the world, publishing research papers is required for advancement. The scientific value of the papers is irrelevant. So yes - AI is seen as useful for people gaming a system for personal advancement at the expense of global scientific progress and the betterment of humanity.
- noman-land 2y agoHaha great wink wink title.
- zoover2020 2y agoIs the Oxford comma also on purpose?
- jean- 2y agoGreat article. One of the papers it cites is https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07183 https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07183, which is also great and looks at the issue of LLM usage to write peer reviews. It’s an issue I’ve noticed personally, as I’m seeing an increasing number of reviews that lack substance and are almost entirely made of filler content. Here’s an excerpt from a particularly egregious recent example I ran into, which had this to say on the subject of meaningful comparison to recent work: > Additionally, while the bibliography appears to be comprehensive, there could be some minor improvements, such as including more recent or relevant references if applicable. The whole review was written like this, with no specific suggestions for improvement, just vague “if applicable” filler. Infuriating.
- Zancarius 2y agoFunny. It used to be if you received that sort of response, you might imagine the author being pressed for time and giving a sort of prewritten/canned copy response. I guess LLMs have removed some of the tedium from the process while making it more tedious for the recipient. That's annoying.
- aussieguy1234 2y agoIt won't take long before it's possible to mask LLM use by making the text sound more human like, without the excess vocab. The leap from how the LLMs write now to how a professional sounding scientist might write their paper is probably not that big. Its possible now to train them on your own writing style.
- grugagag 2y agoIt’s already a thing now https://quillbot.com/paraphrasing-tool https://quillbot.com/paraphrasing-tool
- rockwotj 2y agoYou can do this with shortwave: https://www.shortwave.com/blog/introducing-ghostwriter-ai-writing-that-learns-from-you https://www.shortwave.com/blog/introducing-ghostwriter-ai-wr... On thing that is interesting is that they allow you to add additional prompt, because sometimes you don’t want an email to actually sound like you but it to sound like the writer you want to be (leveling up so to speak)
- userbinator 2y agoGiven how many people can't seem to distinguish between LLM output and an actual human, and how many actual humans I've interacted with who I only later realised were actually human, I think it won't be long before humans who can distinguish and write distinctively are a minority.
- neilwilson 2y agoIt's already possible. Upload your text and one you want it to look like, then instruct chatGPT4o to rewrite the first text so it follows the word structure, form and layout of the second one. Then run the whole lot through Grammarly in academic mode to get rid of flowery words and tortuous structures. Too many academic papers try to impress with complex language rather than explaining what needs to be explained in a pithy and succinct manner.
- aussieguy1234 2y ago
- Animats 2y agoTheir list: delves crucial potential these significant important They're not the first to make this observation. Others have picked up that LLM's like the word "delves". LLMs are trained on texts which contain much marketing material. So they tend to use some marketing words when generating pseudo-academic content. No surprise there. I'm surprised it's not worse. What happens if you use a prompt containing "Write in a style that maximizes marketing impact"?" ('You can't always use "Free", but you can always use "New"' - from a book on copywriting.)
- nicce 2y agoTraditional grammar correction applications usually drop the "important" words as well and suggests something else.
- SoftTalker 2y agoIf you're interested in writing more clearly, avoiding jargon and verbosity, have a look at Essays on CIA Writing https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3894798/CIA-RDP78-00915R001400200001-3-Compressed.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3894798/CIA-RDP78-009... Despite being published in 1962, I find has a lot of advice that still works today.
- yannis 2y agoHehehe good find complete with redactions in some places!
- Hizonner 2y agoI use at least four of those pretty heavily, and I suspect that I'm in the top quartile in terms of using at least three of them. I guess I'm going to be queued for deactivation now.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoIf you only note your significant thoughts, marking them as as much is okay. That filter is what AIs lack. On the upside, the advent of AI has made both vendor selection and project winning simpler. For the former, I can filter within seconds. For the latter, showing examples of competitors’ AI-derived speech is enough to get them eliminated.
- AlienRobot 2y agoThis is so disappointing.
- josephg 2y agoEh. Its a tool, just like a calculator, a computer or a drug. Just like everything else that has potency, you can use it well or poorly. I got some help from ChatGPT while writing a recent paper. At one point while writing, I couldn't find a straightforward way to express myself. I was stuck - and then every attempt at writing the same paragraph came out worse than the last. Eventually I gave my draft to chatgpt and asked it to come up with a few suggestions on how to express my ideas more clearly. That really helped. I adapted some of its writing and ended up with a better final result. I'm not sure if anything chatgpt wrote is in the final paper. But I really appreciated the LLM assistance to help me express myself. I'm sure there's a lot of much more egregious examples where chatgpt wholesale wrote large sections of some papers. But its really not the tool that's at fault. Its how the tool is being used. And we simply don't have social norms around that yet, because figuring out norms takes time. The calculator was the same. When is a calculator acceptable in a classroom? In an exam? Our teachers at the time justified "no calculator" policies by saying "You won't have a calculator in your pocket when you're going through life!". And, well, that turned out to be very wrong.
- viccis 2y agoSo you plagiarized for your paper? I mean, people seem to be in agreement that studios using visual AI generated art that draws from existing works is plagiarism, so how did you not commit academic fraud? Did you consider that encountering challenges with expressing yourself and overcoming them is the pedagogical purpose for papers like that? I am assuming your paper was for a class, given your comparison to calculators in a classroom. If not, then my point does not apply. >Our teachers at the time justified "no calculator" policies by saying "You won't have a calculator in your pocket when you're going through life!". And, well, that turned out to be very wrong. The only time we weren't allowed to use calculators was for things like arithmetic and fraction manipulation. It would indeed be absurd to have to consult a calculator for every numerical step you have to take in math work for subsequent years, so I think your teachers were right.
- dkga 2y ago"delving"
- silver_silver 2y agoIt’s possible this is caused by the editors rather than the authors. An old partner edited papers for a large publisher - largely written by non-native speakers and already heavily machine translated - and would almost always use ChatGPT for the first pass when extensive changes were needed. She was paid by the word and also had a pretty intense daily minimum quota so it was practically required to get enough done to earn a liveable wage and avoid being replaced by another remote “contractor”.
- cortesoft 2y agoThis seems strange… this is an old partner, who had a job long enough to know that the only way to hit a quota to was to use ChatGPT, which came out less than two years ago? It seems strange that something that experimental became essential that quickly.
- noizejoy 2y ago> this is an old partner “Old” might be intended to mean “former” or “ex”, which could be as recent as merely weeks ago. (i.e. ESL / lost in translation issue).
- cortesoft 2y agoI took it to mean ex, but even if it was only a week ago, for a tool to become essential within a year of existing is pretty crazy.
- knodi123 2y agoNo kidding... but it did. I have an aunt who's an editor, and she was basically put out of business by chatgpt. She still gets paid by the same people for the same work, but her rate has been slashed, and since she has no interest in using chatgpt, she'll never make it up in volume.
- silver_silver 2y agoThe company is a bit predatory in that they typically employ editors from poorer countries, so her difficulty was more making enough from it than meeting the quota - but the quota was strict enough that you would very quickly lose the position if you kept missing it. I think the situation before ChatGPT was that they employed people who worked very long hours to not earn very much. Apparently turnover was quite high.
- hdhshdhshdjd 2y agoI can’t trust any paper with y-axis labels that are all over the place paired next to each other. Figure 1 is a hot mess.
- kovvy 2y agoThe figures are about the change rather than the absolute value, so it's not too terrible, but even given that, they could have been normalised by being relative to year 1. A quite warm mess, perhaps?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mcmcmc 2y agoThis just makes me think how now, more than ever, it really pays to develop your own distinctive writing voice. It’s not just a way to make yourself stand out, but given how much the way you write can influence your thought process, I worry that all the students ChatGPTing their way through language arts classes will be ultimately more susceptible to groupthink and online influence campaigns.
- electrodank 2y agoI don’t agree with this. Quick assessment: what makes someone more susceptible to groupthink? To propaganda? Is it the way they write? That doesn’t sound right. It is not an LLM/ChatGPT-borne ailment. So I would not paint these tools as such a boogeyman.
- kccqzy 2y agoDeveloping such a voice really requires you to read other writing voices minimally lest you be influenced by other voices. I think outside of news, I would be perfectly happy reading only pre-2022 publications. I just don't know how sustainable this is.
- markerz 2y agoI disagree, I think a successful writing voice involves reading a lot of different styles and picking the elements that really speak to you.
- Loic 2y agoIt requires writing a lot, more than reading a lot.
- kccqzy 2y agoI disagree respectfully. Before I write anything substantial, I re-read the few books that I really like to let me subconsciously absorb their elements. If I read modern journalism right before I write, whatever I write will be just like modern journalism: bland and boring. At least for me, there is a very large but temporally proximate influence between what I read and what I write.
- seydor 2y agoNothing wrong with it. Citing each other introduces more bias than chatGPT anyway. do you expect me to write the same introduction to the same subject for the 17th time? Large parts of any paper are redundant
- utkuumur 2y agoI couldn't agree more! What am I supposed to do with the related work section? Especially after reading many similar works in the field, it is very hard not to be influenced by what you read but you have to make sure not to say the same thing.
- kovezd 2y agoI wish we would distinguish editing, from writing.
- nathants 2y agogood. embarrassing. human and machine both should aim for brevity and clarity, and feel shame otherwise. then we can read more and better in our lives.
- darepublic 2y ago> while brevity and clarity hold significant value in various contexts, they should not be imposed as universal standards at the expense of depth, nuance, and emotional richness. By delving into diverse communication styles and purposes, we enhance our ability to understand and connect with one another, thereby enriching both our personal and intellectual lives.
- nathants 2y agocharge by the token much?
- doe_eyes 2y ago> We show that the appearance of LLM-based writing assistants has had an unprecedented impact in the scientific literature, surpassing the effect of major world events such as the Covid pandemic. I'm not quite sure this follows. At the very least, I think they should also consider the possibility of social contagion: if some of your colleagues start using a new word in work-related writing, you usually pick that up. The spread of "delve" was certainly bootstrapped by ChatGPT, but I'm not sure that the use of LLMs is the only possible explanation for its growing popularity. Even in the pre-ChatGPT days, it was common for a new term to come out of nowhere and then spread like a wildfire in formal writing. "Utilize" for "use", etc.
- stavros 2y agoThere are a few language shifts that happened in the past few years. The use of the singular "they", "there's a few" instead of "there are a few", the "like" filler word, etc. It's not that unusual.
- ben_w 2y agoAnd some of the post-LLM cliches are almost certainly purely human in their memetic spread — "moat" and "stochastic parrot" in particular come to mind.
- xanderlewis 2y ago‘Moat’ is everywhere now, isn’t it? I thought it was just me.
- saghm 2y agoSingular they has been around much more than the "past few years": https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/singular-nonbinary-they https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/singular-nonbinary-... > We will note that they has been in consistent use as a singular pronoun since the late 1300s; that the development of singular they mirrors the development of the singular you from the plural you, yet we don’t complain that singular you is ungrammatical; and that regardless of what detractors say, nearly everyone uses the singular they in casual conversation and often in formal writing.
- sans_souse 2y agoGemini: "subtle nuances"
- MrSkelter 2y agoThis apparent language shift is mainly due to Lon’s being trained on all language and not just modern American writing tied to post Hemingway ideals of brevity. Much of the language considered odd is standard British English, like the singular they. Also the use of wider vocabulary isn’t considered bad writing outside the Us where specificity is valued over simplicity.
- sva_ 2y agoCan even See this in Google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=Delves&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
- Hemagowda 2y ago[flagged]
- utkuumur 2y agoI don't see why many people complaining on this issue. Not everyone mastered English unfortunately. I am especially very weak at writing a paper, and to be honest, find it taxing. I love research but after having results, turning it into a paper is not fun. I edit almost everything important I write like emails and papers with LLMs because even though the content is nice my writing feels very bland and lacks lots of transition. I believe many people do this and actually, this helps you learn over time. However, what you learn is to write like LLMs since basically we are supervised by the LLM.
- barfbagginus 2y ago[dead]
- GLORIA90 2y ago[dead]
- ein0p 2y agoEven pre-LLMs, I’d basically rewrite papers using simpler language when I was a co-author. The baseline was never very good, I’m afraid. For some reason researchers love using ten-dollar words even though their overuse makes the paper read pretentious and obfuscates the meaning. Folks, please read the following essay by Orwell, and then read it again and again until it sinks: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- Alifatisk 2y agoWe live in an era where academics use gpt to spew out papers, and have an audience (not all) who use gpt to summarize and extract the meaningful content from it. We truly live in the informations age. On a side note, do people still use ChatGPT to fill out their papers? I found Claude to be way better at spitting out more content. In my experience, ChatGPT has been in the middle while Gemini is the worst, it even cuts-off in the middle of the sentence.