Following up on last week’s issue re: two years of ChatGPT, I’ve been thinking about something. How do you know, on a word or sentence level, when someone’s used it? What are the tells? What separates “this is kinda formulaic writing” from “this is definitely AI”?
As you may remember from a previous newsletter, GPT loves to “delve.” Its preference for overly formal, vaguely British language is a well-documented result of being trained by workers in Nigeria, where “delve” is used in a business context far more than in the U.S. or anywhere else. A few more tells, via Jordan Gibbs who analyzed 1 million words from the machine and published his results on Medium:
- Tirelessly
- Cannot
- Reimagined
- Intertwine
- Intricate
- Tapestry
- Expanse
- Kaleidoscopic
A more recent analysis corroborates these findings, and adds a few more words. Pivotal. Vital. Comprehensive. ChatGPT also imitates certain syntax patterns common among smart-sounding writing, like em dashes and colons in titles.
There’s a deeper pattern I’ve noticed, though: ChatGPT can’t write well in first-person. By “well” I don’t just mean clearly. I mean the type of first-person writing where you feel like there’s a real human behind the words. (This is a great example of writing that felt 100% human to me.) One way humans do that — show other people we’re human, not automatons — is by telling jokes, but ChatGPT kind of fails at being funny. I mean, it’s fine at dad jokes (one-liners, puns, predictable humor) but it’s terrible at a type of humor that is uniquely human: subtext. Humor that says more than what words alone convey. An example: Sarah Cooper’s 10 tricks to appear smart in meetings, which communicates nuanced subtext about corporate conformity.
Journalist Will Lockett writes: “As ChatGPT doesn’t actually know what it is writing, it can’t have the self-aware, helicopter view of writing needed to create great subtext.” ChatGPT might be able to riff on a theme, but it doesn’t have the societal and self-awareness to come up with those themes in the first place.
Source: Harris Sockel
https://medium.com/blog/chatgpts-favorite-words-punctuation-fca042bb6bea
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