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Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

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Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#221

Post by mickelsen »

whatagreatboy wrote: post #219
mickelsen wrote: post #216

I 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 o…

Are you worried that ChatGPT will give you wrong words just because they look natural? (And yes it does)

For 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.

Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#222

Post by bluefirebrand »

dragonwriter wrote: post #56
jgalt212 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

> 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

Nowadays if you write anything you only have two audiences

The first audience is people who care what you are saying

The second audience is AI scrapers

People who do not care what you have to say will have an AI summarize it for them, so they aren't your audience

Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#223

Post by jibal »

"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.

Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#224

Post by hliyan »

xhevahir wrote: post #214
hliyan wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Those are not superlatives.

Funnily enough, I was using the word superlative more as an adjective, than the noun that refers to the part of grammer (adjective), if that makes sense.

Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#225

Post by CPLX »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #10
milancurcic wrote: post #4

"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…

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

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.

Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#226

Post by booleandilemma »

milancurcic wrote: post #4

"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…

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.

Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#227

Post by jibal »

CPLX wrote: post #225
diego_sandoval wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 th…

Use of spell check is a net positive but it has led to some widespread errors, like people (and widely read publications) misspelling "led" as "lead" (pet peeve).

But yes, it's absurd to complain about LLMs resulting in increased literacy.

Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#228

Post by jibal »

viccis wrote: post #148
Fade_Dance wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good. It's a crutch for poorly composed sentences or for prose intending to imitate the affect of poorly composed sentences. There's not a single sentence under the sun that needs an emdash. Commas and parentheses can do it all, and an excess of either is a sign of poorly edited prose. I don't buy the pro-clanker pro-em dash movement that has come out of nowhere in the past several years.

> prose intending to imitate the affect of poorly composed sentences

Anyone who makes errors like this should not be talking.

Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#229

Post by mh- »

jjani wrote: post #204
bonoboTP wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Whenever there are commonly agreed upon and known tell-tale signs of AI writing It's been two years now since such commonly agreed upon signs appeared yet by and large they're still just as present to this day.

Survivor bias. You don't know what you're not spotting in the wild.

Re: Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech

#230

Post by jibal »

Taek wrote: post #55
diego_sandoval wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 givea…

> I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong

I've found that people who say this sort of thing rarely change their beliefs, even after being given evidence that they are wrong. The fact is, as numerous people have pointed out, Word and other editors/word processors change '--' to an em-dash. And the "slang version" of an em-dash is "I went to work--but forgot to put on pants", not "I went to work - but forgot to put on pants".

BTW, "humans almost always tend to use" is very poor writing--pick one or the other between "almost always" and "tend to". It wouldn't be a bad thing if LLMs helped increase human literacy, so I don't know why people are so gung ho on identifying AI output based on utterly non-substantive markers like em-dashes. Having an LLM do homework is a bad thing, but that's not what we're talking about. And someone foolishly using the presence of em-dashes to detect LLM output will utterly fail against someone using an editor macro to replace em-dashes with the gawdawful ' - '.

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