mobrec

A wonderful article from El Pais about the impact that interactions with LLMs are having with how people speak to other people. And, yes, the use of ‘delve’ in the title was ironic.

We’re experiencing a ChatGPTification of everything. While we await the life-changing leap promised by companies with multi-million-dollar marketing budgets, the major language models, of which ChatGPT is the most widely implemented, force us to speak with strange words, combining adjectives we would never have used three years ago. We entrust our private life to an entity that could “testify” against us in court in the future (a circumstance that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself has warned about), and we revert to magical thinking, believing that for a few dollars a month we have the oracle on our computer.

Since November 2022, when ChatGPT was launched, we’ve become more insecure and prefer to have a robot make decisions for us and write our emails, which we send unread and are unable to remember. We’re working less, it’s true. Perhaps the most cited MIT study of the year, Your Brain on ChatGPT, finds that we’re a little lazier than we were three years ago. We’re also more gullible, mediocre, and, paradoxically, distrustful. We use AI for almost everything, while remaining suspicious of and unwilling to pay for anything that smells synthetic, generated by the very systems we worship.

At scientific conferences where English is the lingua franca, there’s a scarlet letter: the verb “to delve.” “It’s the catchphrase that betrays someone who’s gone too far with ChatGPT,” confirms Ezequiel López, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute. López is co-author of a study that, after analyzing 280,000 videos from academic YouTube channels, showed that 18 months after ChatGPT’s global release, the use of delve had increased by 51% in talks and conferences, and also in 10,000 scientific articles edited by artificial intelligence models. Delve, a verb that was barely used in the pre-ChatGPT era, has become a neon sign that marks anyone who repeats everything Altman’s generative AI spews out. “Now, it’s a taboo word that people avoid because the laughter starts right away,” says López. At this point in the game, ChatGPT rules what we say, but also what we don’t say.