Have you noticed your AI assistant’s favourite words?
chat assistants themselves what their favourite words were. Gemini used to favour ‘Delve’, but this has faded as AI feeds on new content and training. Similarly, ‘Tapestry’, ‘Leverage’, and the em dash.
Then there’s ’Moreover’ and ‘Realm’ and ‘Testament to’, ‘Furthermore’, ‘Indeed”, and ‘Unprecedented’. Interestingly, in India, we tend to use many of these terms in any case, so they won’t help identify AI-generated content. The Americans find them alien.There are also writing styles that, irrespective of the specific words, smell like AI straight away.
There’s bullet-point poetry and a breakdown of content. “Why it works…” and that’s followed by a list. There’s the ‘not x, but y’ format and the use of the slash sign.
AI has truly ruined the use of the em dash for me—I used to be quite fond of it myself. Now I have to work at avoiding the em dash and so many other words. And there are so many of them, linguist and author Adam Grant has written a whole book on the subject: Algospeak.ChatGPT came up with a valiant if long-winded défence of why it used ‘Quiet’ and ‘Calmly’ so much.
“What’s happening is not attachment to a specific word but a gravitational pull towards certain tone markers when discussing reflective or analytical ideas. In English explanatory prose, words like quiet, gentle, subtle, calm, and soft function almost like punctuation for mood. When the topic is observation rather than argument, the language model tends to reach for that register automatically.
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