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Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
- rokkamokka 1y agoClearly ChatGPT is streets ahead
- lucaspauker 1y agoIn a similar way, I tend to avoid em dashes now when I write, even though I used to use them a lot.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Taek 1y agoJust use normal dashes. AI's very notably always use the emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it - but humans tend to use a single dash with spaces on either side. The AI emdash is notably AI because most people don't even know how to produce the double long dash on their keyboard, and therefore default to the single dash with spaces method, which keeps their writing as quite visibly human.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- adastra22 1y agoMy keyboard turns double dashes into em dashes.
- al_borland 1y agoDon’t let AI dumb you down.
- milancurcic 1y ago"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 1y agoSame thing as with em dashes. Some of us have been using em dashes from before ChatGPT.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoUnfortunately the em dash has already been relegated to the dungeon of AI suspicion for the next 5-10 years.
- sho_hn 1y agoMy workaround (well, to be honest, I've always done this: I love a good em dash, they're terrifically satisfying to use, but I'm too lazy to type them), is to use two single dashes--like so.
- adastra22 1y agoMy editor turns two single dashes into an em-dash—like this. (iOS)
- al_borland 1y agoDepending on your editor, your double dash method may auto-convert to an em dash.
- nick49488171 1y agoDo you also end ambiguously questioning messages with a double dot..
- lukeinator42 1y agoI saw a snippet of a podcast on instagram recently where both the host and guest used the word delve, and it reminded me of a year or two ago when that was used as a telltale sign of LLM writing. Interesting to see it actually quantified.
- esafak 1y agoOf 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.
- bonoboTP 1y agoAnd 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.
- mrbonner 1y agoI 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.
- dakiol 1y agoSame. 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.
- QuantumNomad_ 1y ago> 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.
- gus_massa 1y agoI agree, the GP should at the end of the sentence the second verb insert.
- abraham 1y agoNot to boast but this will surpass many an intricate topic and you should strategically delve into it before it garners meticulous attention.
- GoatInGrey 1y agoYou're absolutely right!
- rogerrogerr 1y agoLook it’s AGI!
- fergal 1y agoThis hits different.
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- yesco 1y agoLLMs write in a very coherent, easy to understand way. I see no reason why someone wouldn't want to copy their style or vocabulary if they want to improve their communication skills. Despite all the complaints about AI slop, there is something ironic about the fact that simply being exposed to it might be a net positive influence for most of society. Discord often begins from the simplest of communication errors after all...
- capnrefsmmat 1y agoSure, if you're learning to write and want lots of examples of a particular style, LLMs can generate that for you. Just don't assume that is a normal writing style, or that it matches a particular genre (say, workplace communication, or academic writing, or whatever). Our experience (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107) is that LLMs like GPT-4o have a particular writing style, including both vocabulary and distinct grammatical features, regardless of the type of text they're prompted with. The style is informationally dense, features longer words, and favors certain grammatical structures (like participles; GPT-4o loooooves participles). With Llama we're able to compare base and instruction-tuned models, and it's the instruction-tuned models that show the biggest differences. Evidently the AI companies are (deliberately or not) introducing particular writing styles with their instruction-tuning process. I'd like to get access to more base models to compare and figure out why.
- yesco 1y agoI definitely know what you mean, each model definitely has it's own style. I find myself mentally framing them as like horses with different personalities and riding quirks. Still, perhaps saying "copy" was a bit misleading. Influence would have been more precise way of putting it. After all, there is no such thing as a "normal" writing style in the first place. So long as you communicate with anything or anyone, I find people will naturally just absorb the parts they like without even noticing most of the time.
- ACCount37 1y agoGo vibe check Kimi-K2. One of the weirdest models out there now, and it's open weights - with both "base" and "instruct" versions available. The language it uses is peculiar. It's like the entire model is a little bit ESL. I suspect that this pattern comes from SFT and RLHF, not the optimizer or the base architecture or the pre-training dataset choices, and the base model itself would perform much more "in line" with other base models. But I could be wrong. Goes to show just how "entangled" those AIs are, and how easy it is to affect them in unexpected ways with training. Base models have a vast set of "styles" and "language usage patterns" they could draw from - but instruct-tuning makes a certain set of base model features into the "default" persona, shaping the writing style this AI would use down the line.
- freehorse 1y agoI 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?
- ACCount37 1y agoA lot of those "ESL" patterns are cultural. It's a mix of a cultural "founder effect" - whoever writes the English textbooks and the dictionaries gets to shape how English is learned in a given country - and also the usage patterns of the source language seeping through. In your case, it's mostly the latter. Chinese has a common word with a fairly broad meaning, which often gets translated as "meticulous". Both by inexperienced humans and by translation software. Ironically, a few Chinese LLMs replicate those Chinese patterns when speaking English. They had enough "clean" English in their pre-training datasets to be able to speak English. But LLMs are SFT'd with human-picked "golden" samples and trained with RLHF - using feedback from human evaluators. So Chinese evaluators probably shifted the LLMs towards "English with Chinese ESL influence".
- wink 1y agoESL here, not Chinese. I find meticulous to be a perfectly normal word, I think I don't really use it, but I think I read it from time to time, but maybe I just read some sort of publication by a fan of the word? :) Same for surpass and boast, I think I use "surpass expectations" and I had to think for a moment, I would use 'brag' these days but pretty sure in school I learned boast, which sounds more formal BE to me, but of course I'm just guessing here.
- redwall_hp 1y agoThey're all perfectly normal words that literate people use. The problem is the typical American struggles to read beyond a fifth grade level and is actively hostile toward more advanced vocabulary, as the country is deeply anti-intellectual overall. ChatGPT, of course, behaves like its training set...and the majority of that set is professional writers' published works, which would be more likely to use words like that. It's a collision of academic and literary writing styles with the expectations of people who think Harry Potter or the New York Times (which specifically targets a fifth grade level, placing them above other papers) are challenging reads.
- modzu 1y agocertainly! of course! you're my god
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoThus, boasting about surpassing a meticulously detailed article obviously strategically written by a LLM to garner animosity from human users. Truly we embiggen our vocabulary =3
- anigbrowl 1y agoI would have headlined this as 'American literacy improves slightly.'
- Aurornis 1y ago> 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.
- rogerrogerr 1y agoYou 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.
- Aurornis 1y ago> most of us will just assume you used the slop machine and stop reading whatever you wrote 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.
- rogerrogerr 1y agoWouldn't surprise me if that's true. I just treat any AI-smelling content as an information hazard that is _at best_ providing no useful entropy and stop reading it. Something about it is just so repulsive.
- oasisaimlessly 1y agoYeah, that's human nature.
- adastra22 1y agoAnd was true before AI. The means have changed, not the built-in human bias.
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- tasty_freeze 1y agoThis 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.
- VagabundoP 1y agoDelve is a weird one for me as a D&D nerd. It just seems normal...
- lorenzohess 1y agoBuzzword is a buzzword
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- stocksinsmocks 1y agoYou’re absolutely right!
- theturtle 1y agoThis is how shitwords like "impactful" sneak into speech. Say it around me and I can see your credibility flow away like piss down your leg.
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- rendall 1y agoI can see these words impact you.
- nticompass 1y agoWhat an impactful thing to say! Do you actually think that or was your comment just to garner attention?
- goopypoop 1y agomy hammer is impactive but my broken thumb is impactful
- vpShane 1y agoThis sounds 'Robust'
- _1 1y agoI've noticed an uptick on emails with random mid-sentence bolding and more bullet lists.
- weikju 1y agoI was always using those to present information on an easy to digest way and highlight important things. The good thing is my emails still contain information not just content…
- monkpit 1y agoYou’re absolutely right!
- nowittyusername 1y agoA 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.
- goopypoop 1y agobefore pulling off their faces
- BluSyn 1y agoI would expect AI to influence slang in future generations. Would be more surprising if it didn't.
- willquack 1y agoI 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. """
- rafram 1y agoSome 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?
- creatonez 1y agoThis 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.
- recursivedoubts 1y agoYour absolutely right!
- dpkirchner 1y agoThe AI is evolving
- jameslk 1y ago> 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
- jofzar 1y agoThere's just words which previously were never used because there is a. more "common" word in the general lexicon. An example of this is "delve" it's a perfectly fine word to use but chatgpt loved it, it's now super common to see in troubleshooting/abstracts because of it.
- crooked-v 1y agoFrom what I understand, the apparent overuse of "delve" comes from its popularity in Nigerian English, where various evaluators were hired who are highly English literate but will work for tiny wages by US standards.
- majeedkazemi 1y ago"leverage"
- manesioz 1y agoResearchers find evidence of buzzword "buzzword" in their papers
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI’m old enough to remember Frank and Moon Unit Zappa’s Valley Girl[0]. It reflected local Los Angeles culture, but it wasn’t long before I was hearing the same type of speech, everywhere (I lived in Maryland, at the time). [0] https://youtu.be/R5Q1yVLSR3I https://youtu.be/R5Q1yVLSR3I
- tqi 1y agoThis 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.
- mastermage 1y agoAs a fantasy fan.... well time to delve into the dungeon.
- rendall 1y agoIt’s not just ChatGPT in our feeds — it’s ChatGPT in our mouths!
- jjani 1y agoIn the ever-changing world of human language, the frequency of ChatGPT verbiage is rapidly increasing.
- mickelsen 1y agoI 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.
- whatagreatboy 1y agoAre you worried that ChatGPT will give you wrong words just because they look natural? (And yes it does)
- mickelsen 1y agoFor anything serious I'd still double check, but my go-to strategy of googling expressions in quotes isn't that useful anymore. Here in HN (or any other forum), I've only done it very few times, because the thing rewrites it in a voice that doesn't sound like me, which I don't like. Plus I don't aim to keep a polished identity here, so I'm fine with the occasional mistake. Also I've been like 10+ years with this account, but lurking since 2011 or so... I guess what would offend me the most is someone treating me like a bot because I end up sounding like AI-slop in the future.
- jibal 1y ago"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.
- MrManatee 1y agoWith 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.
- johnnienaked 1y agoChatgpt buzzwords do not exist. These are all extremely common English words
- submeta 1y agoThe box of pandora has been opened now. There’s no going back. In a few decades writing long texts all by yourself is going be an artisan thing that only a few people will engage in. You will put together your arguments, and an llm will elaborate it. Will humanity become more dumb? Did we get dumber because we don’t do calculus by hand now?
- prmoustache 1y agoI don't know but I realize that very few people I encounter are comfortable calculating stuff like splitting a bill in a bar/restaurant without help. I still like doing it, thinking it may possibly aid my brain age better.
- wiseowise 1y agoThat’s a great observation!
- visarga 1y agoLLMs chat with 1B people for the estimated amount of 1T tokens per day. That is 1T tokens flowing into human brains every day. It certainly has to cause some effects on our language use and skills. I rarely use Google Search anymore.
- DrBazza 1y agoIt 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. https://nolearnings.com/ https://nolearnings.com/
- closewith 1y ago> 'Please revert' seems to be from the 00's, it's 'reply'. There are others I've tried to ignore and forget. Reversion to a topic during a conversation has been used for centuries, especially when a conversation reverts to a tedious or exhausting topic. So if you accept that you want someone to get back to you on a dreary or boring request, then it's particularly apt.
- abanana 1y ago"Please revert" is standard in South African and Indian English. A regional difference rather than an oddity from a point in history.
- halper 1y agoI have made a learning and it is that one could have an ask.
- redwall_hp 1y ago"Learnings" is corporate-speak. Like everything being "an ask." "The ask from marketing is that the logo 'pop' more." "Did you get the ask I emailed you?" I strongly dislike both, but they derive from real, vacuous humans.
- ionwake 1y agoReminds me of the HN user who commented along the lines of " I am writing a script to remove double dashes. Not because he wanted to use AI output and pass it off as more human, but because he - and I paraphrase -- "wanted to make sure he could apply double dashes as per his usual vernacular". tldr; There are people even on HN covering up their own AI output under the guise of taking back ownership of literature. Im still taken aback by the audacity of these hoops.
- megaloblasto 1y agoI see this happening in my own life too. I've started saying "great question! ::smiley emoji::" when people ask me dumb questions
- ModernMech 1y agoNice -- it seems like the researchers really have their thumb on the pulse, and are getting down to the core of the issue.
- mikewarot 1y agoIn other words ChatGPT is catching up with my patterns of speech. I really wish I had deleted all of my comments on Reddit before I nuked my account. It would have left a measurable hole. I had a decade of being in a job with 80+% free time. It's quite possible 0.001% of everything in the training set came from me. I'm never going to be compensated, but I hope I didn't derange it too badly. ;-)
- Perepiska 1y agoImmediately remember this one: https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study-explains-laws-incomprehensible-writing-style-0819 https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study-explains-laws-incomprehe...