6 ms·
LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary
- em3rgent0rdr 1y ago"Delves", "potential", and "significant" all made a large increase. Those words also strike me as the non-committal weasel words Google's AI overview for Google searches tends to produce as the AI isn't really entirely sure it can make a definitive conclusion.
- tiahura 1y agoPotential I’ll grant you, but how are significant and delves weasel words?
- dmead 1y agoIf you're reading a paper you're already delving. It's clearly filler.
- leakycap 1y agoWhat does "significant" mean? It means whatever I say it means, it's fairly useless as anything to convey a fact without a definition. If I needed to program a light sensor to signal when it detects "significant" change in lighting, what does that mean? If I don't define it, it means nothing. -- "Delve" is a style word, another category highlighted in the article as a signature of generated text.
- Leherenn 1y agoI read it as "statistically significant", i.e. above noise/error level. Sounds pretty well defined to me, at least in a scientific paper.
- leakycap 1y agoThe reason it is a weasel word is exactly this -- it is a word with an implied meaning, not an implicit one. We aren't talking about "statistically significant" -- that carries meaning only if the statistic is explained, though.
- redwall_hp 1y agoSignificant has a very specific meaning in statistics, which is going to come up in any biomedical research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance
- leakycap 1y agoDo you think an LLM takes this into account when it uses the word?
- tiahura 1y agoIs the context statistical? If so, then yes.
- leakycap 1y agoWe clearly disagree, in that case - have you used LLMs? The person I was replying to linked to a Wiki article on "statistical significance" which is not the word being used or discussed in this convo; did you note that before you replied? You expect an AI to follow context, but the context switched here and none of the humans are seemingly pointing it out. I'd expect LESS of an LLM, not more.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- leakycap 1y agoFascinating to see that the word "important" dropped off in usage Given the way generated text works, it makes sense it would less often highlight a directly important phrase or passage or detail, since it has no understanding of what it is writing.
- userbinator 1y ago"delves" is stereotypical LLM-ese to me. I don't think I've ever heard a real human use that word before LLMs became common.
- sincerely 1y agoMagic the Gathering players are intimately familiar with the term :)
- ummonk 1y agoI’ve only ever seen it used in magic the gathering
- ToValueFunfetti 1y agoThe dwarves of Moria are notable for having delved to excess.
- SoftTalker 1y agoI'd see it occasionally, usually in bullshit corporate writing replete with other buzzwords, which is probably where the LLMs picked up on it.
- jowea 1y agoIt seems it is common in Nigerian English, from where in ended up in AI datasets.
- OtherShrezzing 1y agoI think it’s from YouTube. “With that, we can delve into [topic]” was part of the vocabulary for video essays for years. It always joined an introduction’s closing thesis statement with the rest of the video content.
- bongodongobob 1y agoDelves has a huge increase because it's a new thing in WoW. That's why you see a big spike in Google trends. If you see an article that claims "delves" increase is because of LLMs, you can safely ignore anything else it has to say.
- derbOac 1y agoTook me too long to catch the playful (or hinting?) word use in the title.
- leakycap 1y agoI had downloaded the article and began taking notes and hadn't noticed until your comment. Oh dear.
- pcrh 1y agoThe post title isn't grammatically correct. It should be "caused a" or "shifts"
- HappMacDonald 1y agoThis strikes me as the kind of language fingerprinting someone might use to look for things that I write: I tend to discard articles (a, the, things like that) when I'm in a hurry.
- pcrh 1y agoThe post title has now been changed to be the same as the article's title.
- accrual 1y agoI'm not a scientist or someone producing technical literature for others to consume, but I feel like I'd want my humanity to come through on important topics like this. I love using LLMs but there are some tasks (like writing comments or texting friends) that I refuse to use them with, otherwise I'm applying `normalizeText(myUniqueText)`. I'm sure there are deadlines and other constraints that cause professionals to reach for LLMs when producing their work, just like school-age kids use them for homework so they have more time to do whatever they'd rather be doing, so I can understand.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoOk, but what if your humanity expresses itself best in a language that only 20M people speak with no major biomedical publications?
- leakycap 1y ago> your humanity expresses itself best I don't think these papers are about human expression; they're about communicating data and learned information in a way that can be used by others. You might be thinking of the field of art, which also has strong opinions about AI in their field.
- JuettnerDistrib 1y agoI'm sure many researchers have English as a second language, and rely on LLM to fix their grammar and vocabulary.
- leakycap 1y agoWhich is horrifying: if an ESL author must publish in English and therefore does not have a full grasp of nuances and meaning conveyed by English wording, they should involve an editor... not a word machine that doesn't understand, either. Wording matters when conveying information, ESL speakers should be working with fellow humans when publishing in a language they do not feel comfortable writing on their own.
- mtkd 1y agoI expect in a few days there will be a new tool launched that returns word frequency/velocity in recent biomedical papers ... so next year's PhDs can level things using an MCP function
- lawlessone 1y agoWill there? is someone working on it?
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoSomething you've gotta understand is that the majority of English-language scientific journal articles are written by authors who aren't native English speakers/writers. > https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202333/publication-output-by-region-country-or-economy-and-by-scientific-field https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202333/publication-output-by-r... In the past, just after they submit a poorly-written paper, the sleazeballs at Wiley/Elsevier/Springer would "encourage" said authors to employ their "Author Services" who would edit and rewrite their paper for them, and resubmit it for publication. This didn't come cheap. Today, everybody just uses LLMs. LLMs are masterful translators of language and concepts. It's a win-win for everybody but Author Services. Admittedly, word choice and sentence structure are much more limited. (This is not necessarily a bad thing. LLM-written scientific papers can be clearer, and are often more tidy, than human-written scientific papers.) I don't like seeing LLM-written text in journalism, literature, and other media, but I don't mind it so much in scientific literature -- if there's no fraud involved, that is.
- leakycap 1y ago> It's a win-win for everybody but Author Services. Having work that can be edited by a human who understands the concepts –or at least the words— shows a great depth of usefulness to the work itself. Running your rough draft in one language through an LLM so it appears, at surface glance, to be similar to a publication that a team of humans had been involved in doesn't actually provide value to the author or the reader. Now the author has a paper they cannot say they wrote (or indeed, say who wrote it) and the reader cannot assume that what they read was intended to mean what it now means in English. If anything, people who write papers in another language to be published in English should be leaning more than ever on human editors and quality assurance measures, not slop machines that hallucinate with good grammar.
- DontBreakAlex 1y agoI find it quite insulting that you seem to think that non-native english speakers are incapable of reading the outputs of LLMs to asses if it still means what they intended to say.
- fallinditch 1y agoI both like and dislike the writing style of LLMs. I like the clarity and easy-to-read usability, but at the same time I find the stylistic tics and overusage of words and phrases often grates. I wonder if this stylistic failure is something that will get fixed or if it's the inevitable consequence of LLMs.
- sandspar 1y agoIt might be because millions of people interact with the same entity and then swap notes. Someone points out "delve" and “it’s not just X, it’s Y,” and other people go, “Yeah, I see that too!” It's the same thing with celebrity impressions. Everyone’s watched Jack Nicholson enough to sense his quirks without naming them. Then a comedian highlights those quirks, and we’re like, “Haha, that’s EXACTLY it!”
- leakycap 1y agoYou need to prompt the LLM to provide the style you want. I have sometimes drag a few of my rough notes into the prompt and tell it to write me an article explaining this topic in the style of a site like The Verge, Daring Fireball, NYT, the onion, etc... I don't publish this kind of output or build on it, but it makes my own topic I need to review more interesting and makes me question it as if I was reading it on a site like those I mention. Using this kind of output as your own work seems weird, given it is templating so hard on your references -- but I don't like reading the pollyanna GPT speak.
- pona-a 1y agoI think a lot of these are artifacts of RLHF and left-to-right thinking, and one might actually go away with diffusion LLMs. If anyone here spoke to Gemini Diffusion, does it have different speech patterns?
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoFirst time I've heard about Gemini Diffusion. I thought it was only a matter of time before others would adopt it as soon as I saw the paper by inceptionlabs.ai. Not sure I'm happy about LLMS getting better... but it feels like an obvious improvement in both computational efficiency and training method.
- leakycap 1y agoGenerated text seems to work because so few people read and even fewer think as they read. AI writing often creates a firehose output of sing-songy, long, over styled text -- which is a lot to ask a reader to get through and really comprehend. I'm guilty of forming my own conclusion or just believing what I see when I'm in a hurry or unfamiliar or don't care a ton. I'd rather read a human's rough output than a polished generated text version.
- Animats 1y agoAmusingly, the article talks about "improving equity in science". The linked article, "AI tools can improve equity in science" has a link to Google Scholar.[1] The summary there begins "The global space industry is growing rapidly—the number of satellites in orbit is expected to increase from 9000 today to over 60,000 by 2030 . In addition, it is estimated that more than 100 trillion untracked pieces of old satellites ...". That's because Google Scholar hit a paywall and treated the following unrelated letter as the content. So it looks like the authors used some tool to generate plausible citation links, which they did not read before publishing. They did some real work. Here's their list of "excess style words", ones whose frequency has increased substantially since LLMs: accentuates, acknowledges, acknowledging, addresses, adept, adhered, adhering, advancement, advancements, advancing, advocates, advocating, affirming, afflicted, aiding, akin, align, aligning, aligns, alongside, amidst, assessments, attains, attributed, augmenting, avenue, avenues, bolster, bolstered, bolstering, broader, burgeoning, capabilities, capitalizing, categorized, categorizes, categorizing, combating, commendable, compelling, complicates, complicating, comprehending, comprising, consequently, consolidates, contributing, conversely, correlating, crafted, crafting, culminating, customizing, delineates, delve, delved, delves, delving, demonstrating, dependability, dependable, detailing, detrimentally, diminishes, diminishing, discern, discerned, discernible, discerning, displaying, disrupts, distinctions, distinctive, elevate, elevates, elevating, elucidate, elucidates, elucidating, embracing, emerges, emphasises, emphasising, emphasize, emphasizes, emphasizing, employing, employs, empowers, emulating, emulation, enabling, encapsulates, encompass, encompassed, encompasses, encompassing, endeavors, endeavours, enduring, enhancements, enhances, ensuring, equipping, escalating, evaluates, evolving, exacerbating, examines, exceeding, excels, exceptional, exceptionally, exerting, exhibiting, exhibits, expedite, expediting, exploration, explores, facilitated, facilitates, facilitating, featuring, formidable, fostering, fosters, foundational, furnish, garnered, garnering, gauged, grappling, groundbreaking, groundwork, harness, harnesses, harnessing, heighten, heightened, hinder, hinges, hinting, hold, holds, illuminates, illuminating, imbalances, impacting, impede, impeding, imperative, impressive, inadequately, incorporates, incorporating, influencing, inherent, initially, innovative, inquiries, integrates, integrating, integration, interconnectedness, interplay, intricacies, intricate, intricately, introduces, invaluable, investigates, involves, juxtaposed, leverages, leveraging, maintaining, merges, methodologies, meticulous, meticulously, multifaceted, necessitate, necessitates, necessitating, necessity, notable, noteworthy, nuanced, nuances, offering, optimizing, orchestrating, outlines, overlook, overlooking, paving, persist, pinpoint, pinpointed, pinpointing, pioneering, pioneers, pivotal, poised, pose, posed, poses, posing, predominantly, preserving, pressing, promise, pronounced, propelling, realm, realms, recognizing, refine, refines, refining, remarkable, renowned, revealing, reveals, revolutionize, revolutionizing, revolves, scrutinize, scrutinized, scrutinizing, seamless, seamlessly, seeks, serves, serving, shaping, shedding, showcased, showcases, showcasing, signifying, solidify, spanned, spanning, spurred, stands, stemming, strategically, streamline, streamlined, streamlines, streamlining, struggle, substantiated, substantiates, surged, surmount, surpass, surpassed, surpasses, surpassing, swift, swiftly, thorough, transformative, typically, ultimately, uncharted, uncovering, underexplored, underscore, underscored, underscores, underscoring, unexplored, unlocking, unparalleled, unraveling, unveil, unveiled, unveiling, unveils, uphold, upholding, urging, utilizes, varying, versatility, warranting, yielding. That's the vocabulary of business hype. Those are words that appear frequently in company press releases, and are copied into business publications by cut-and-paste journalists. LLMs asked to polish scientific material will use that vocabulary, even in scientific writing. If you trained an LLM on scientific publications, you'd get more scientific jargon, probably misused. [1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=AI+tools+can+improve+equity+in+science&author=V.+Berdejo-Espinola&author=T.+Amano&publication_year=2023&journal=Science&pages=991&doi=10.1126%2Fscience.adg9714&pmid=36893248 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=AI+tools+can...
- sandspar 1y agoFile under "LLMs as Western soft power victory". Chinese AI's have Western liberal sensibilities, English achieves even deeper dominance in scientific publications etc.
- leakycap 1y agoIt seems like calling a race the second the light turns green. If anything, recent events including AI show me that monumental shifts are more possible today than ever before.
- pcrh 1y agoAs a researcher myself, I find it curious that so many of my peers are turning to LLMs to assist in writing. Writing is a process of communicating one's data and thoughts, and it is the coherent crystallization of such thoughts that produces good scientific papers. I can't imagine a scenario where an LLM would somehow be able to articulate the outcome of original research better than the researcher themselves. And if the researcher can't articulate their findings, it's dubious that they are worth communicating. The exception would only be those who are not native English writers, in which case the LLM might improve grammar, etc.
- gapan 1y ago> The exception would only be those who are not native English writers, in which case the LLM might improve grammar, etc. So, only just the vast majority of people in this world? I'm not sure I would call that "the exception".
- pcrh 1y agoAn LLM would only be able to "polish" a non-native speaker's writing. Otherwise it is not conceivable that it could improve the essential nature of original research being communicated, this is as said original research will not be part of its training dataset. Scientists who hope that using an LLM to help write a paper will improve the quality of their output are deluding themselves.
- gapan 1y ago> An LLM would only be able to "polish" a non-native speaker's writing. Are you really suggesting that all native speakers write perfectly and their writing never needs any corrections whatsoever? I consider that far from the truth for any native speaker of any language and I would of never assumed that.
- pcrh 1y agoEveryone's writing can be improved. However, for native speakers, and especially if they have the level of education where they are producing original research, it would be a rare case that the writing was so bad that the science being communicated was undecipherable.
- jeffbee 1y agoPaper has an A+ title that really should have been submitted!
- arbirk 1y agoI always take issue with the saying the llms are biased. 1) because they are obviously biased as per their training and instructions 2) but are they more biased (at the moment) than google search and wikipedia? They are tools and we all have to get used to them. Soon grok and Deepseek will probably be biased when their owners crack the code, so citing what tools you use will be important.
- bello33595985 1y agoI need to get full current network