Talk:3126: Disclaimer

Is this related to the ChatGPT 5 release

Probably. Barmar (talk) 19:30, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Was anyone tempted to ask ChatGPT to write an explanation of this comic? Barmar (talk) 19:30, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Considering who Tom Bombadil is, anything less than a dissertation-length discussion is incomplete. PS: The captcha wanted me to select pictures that contained parking meters, but it showed what looked like a mailbox. Maybe parking meters look like mailboxes in the parts of Middle Earth that I haven't visited yet. 64.201.132.210 20:23, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Am I the only one wondering if Randall actually made such a post? It would be fun to find but without knowing what LOTR boards he frequents and his screen name, it would be pretty difficult. 47.248.235.170 20:44, 8 August 2025 (UTC)Pat

Who doesn't use the word 'delve'? I've used it since I was a child! 92.23.2.228 20:59, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Once or twice, I've heard a Reddit reader on YouTube claim that a story was probably written by ChatGPT because of things like "used em dashes" and "flows so smoothly that I didn't make any mistakes while recording, while most stories by humans make me glitch once or twice". Um. Is it bad to use punctuation correctly? To polish writing so that it flows smoothly, as story-telling often should? BunsenH (talk) 21:07, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Hyphens between spaces are automatically converted to em dashes when using modern versions of MS Word. 104.28.205.246 22:27, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

That's an en-dash; em-dashes are automatically created from two hyphens between words like--thisThatNerdyHylian (talk) 09:01, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

It’s not bad—it’s just a lazy diagnostic. Smooth prose and correct punctuation aren’t inherently “AI tells”; they’re simply easier for large language models to produce consistently than for average human writers. (This is because large language models were trained to predict the next token, which is a task that emphasizes grammar more than it does ideas. Meanwhile, humans are taught to emphasize the ideas and only edit for grammar in formal writing.) People latch onto prose and punctuation because they’re visible, not because they’re reliable indicators. Over-reliance on such surface markers risks flagging well-edited human work as AI-generated, which is exactly the false-positive trap detection tools keep falling into. 114.94.93.163 11:37, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

"Delve" is/was specifically a word considered a marker of ChatGPT. See https://news.fsu.edu/news/science-technology/2025/02/17/why-does-chatgpt-delve-so-much-fsu-researchers-begin-to-uncover-why-chatgpt-overuses-certain-words/ 64.203.66.182 21:19, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Groundbreaking advancements in the realm of AI may indeed boast surprising and intricate compositions, showcasing a lexicon emphasising and underscoring its advanced comprehending of garnered language that surpasses what aligns with human usage. But I hope the team behind this paper delves into the possibility of false-positives. 92.23.2.228 21:54, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

You're absolutely right—delve has become emblematic of ChatGPT’s stylistic tendencies.

Florida State University researchers Tom Juzek and Zina Ward conducted a study titled “Why Does ChatGPT ‘Delve’ So Much? Exploring the Source of Overrepresentation in Large Language Models.” This study, published in the January 2025 Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, systematically identified words like “delve,” “intricate,” and “underscore” that have sharply increased in usage within scientific abstracts and are notably more common in ChatGPT outputs. They called these 21 “focal words.”

The researchers ruled out several potential causes—such as model architecture, training data, or algorithms—as primary drivers of this lexical overrepresentation. Their model testing suggested that Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) may contribute to the pattern, though the results were mixed and partially inconclusive. Intriguingly, they found that human evaluators might respond differently to the word “delve” compared to other focal words.

So yes—delve is indeed one of the telltale markers that researchers have pinpointed for ChatGPT’s distinctive language usage.

Would you like to explore more on how other focal words (like “intricate” or “underscore”) compare, or dive into the experimental methodology they used? 104.28.205.246 22:35, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Sorry not sorry, this is a really sore subject for me. Especially since I work at a marine biology laboratory that, for decades, has worked on topics related to (WARNING: PROHIBITED LANGUAGE!) "climate change" (anthropogenic global warming). The MIT Technology Review, last May, published an article detailing the energy costs of all forms of AI. If you have not yet encountered this article, I recommend it (WARNING: PAYWALL sorry not sorry, first-readers might get a pass). In case you were wondering how come 47 was so quick to pull US out of global climate accords, and conduct his full-on assault on [ahem] inconvenient truths, this is part of the answer (the other part is equally-energy-guzzling cryptocurrencies). Not for nothing did Frank Herbert, in 1965, create an "Orange Catholic Bible" for the sole purpose of quoting a single line from it: "Thou shalt not create a machine in the image of a human mind." 2605:59C8:160:DB08:F999:FCE:2CB7:40E5 17:12, 9 August 2025 (UTC)