Electronic emails written by ChatGPT are very easy to identify — and for this, you need to pay attention to one word.
The co-founder of the popular American business incubator Y Combinator, Paul Graham, concluded that the presence of the word "delve" in an email is a sign that it was written by ChatGPT.
Someone sent me a cold email proposing a novel project. Then I noticed it used the word "delve."
— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 7, 2024
Responding to this message, I added a diagram. It shows the number of times this word was used exclusively in academic materials from 1990 to 2024.
According to this data, the frequency of the word "delve" increased from less than 2000 times in 2022 to almost 18,000 times in 2024.
In turn, AI Phrase Finder, which used a dataset of 50,000 responses from ChatGPT, discovered that the word "delve" was among the top 10 most commonly used words by ChatGPT.
You can translate delve as "to dig" or "to search." Or as "a pit," "a hollow."
"This is one of those words that people use only when writing and want to sound smart," Graham wrote.
However, in the comments to the post, many users noted that for them, this is quite a normal word. For them, primarily as former colonies of the British Empire (Nigeria, India, etc.)
People who have learnt English in the countries which have British colonial past – this is exactly how we learnt English.
'Delve' is a normal word which we speak.
There is no sense of what word is archaic/out of fashion and what's not!
Often times when I speak English with…
— Osho, ओशो (@oshosidhant) April 8, 2024
Others were outraged, stating that such conclusions are "discrimination against people with a certain vocabulary." However, Graham responded rather succinctly: "kids now learn English from movies."
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