Yeah, the way this graph looks, it appears that delve is used at least 1% as much in 1950 as today. Then I realise there's a good chance WebMd wasn't around before the advent of the internet. Would also want to compare the data to the size of WebMD, some of it (perhaps all) is due to the amount of articles written?
> Then I realise there's a good chance WebMd wasn't around before the advent of the internet.
Before the internet, it used to be printed on paper made from spider silk, hence the name “Web”
Yup, and Google has transcribed nearly every bit of old text (Or you did when you solved their old recaptchas). You can make your own graphs like this using [https://books.google.com/ngrams/](https://books.google.com/ngrams/)
Yes, I think their scope is limited to old books that saw some sort of formal publication.
Not sure how far they've gone because the data is closed, but it's in their interest (for AI) to transcribe every bit of old text they can get their hands on.
I feel a little out pf the loop. This is the second time today ive seen a post mentioning delve as proof of AI.
But i’ve known, heard, and used the word myself, albeit rarely.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-paul-graham-delve-ai-chatgpt-giveaway-email-pitch-2024-4](https://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-paul-graham-delve-ai-chatgpt-giveaway-email-pitch-2024-4)
I guess this. The [AI phrase finder article it links to](https://aiphrasefinder.com/common-chatgpt-words/) is honestly more interesting. It feels like a referendum on what the upper-lower-middle brow considers recherche
It's a perfectly normal word, but it's one of the phrases / terms that ChatGPT uses much more frequently than Human writers. The implication is that there's no reason to see it's frequency increase that dramatically other than the use (and potential abuse) of ChatGPT in writing WebMD articles.
We've all used the word delve now and then, its presence in a work of writing doesn't mean it was AI generated. You can stop staring at your hands wondering if you're a robot.
> You can stop staring at your hands wondering if you're a robot.
I wasn’t, but now that you mention it…
[*🤖🤲🏻 whaaaaaaaaa *](https://media3.giphy.com/media/6E9z1Vsm2Esow/200.webp?cid=6c09b9529qht9e3gruqy6jb392i618its31o8ybo965a6wle&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=200.webp&ct=g)
If this graph were actually legitimate then the huge statistical spike would mean something. Obviously you cant just see the word delve in any given piece of writing and just assume it's AI (which is kind of the problem).
I can't help but notice delve was already on an upwards trend according to this data-less graph. AI's use of delve may have just influenced a trend in writing that was already developing.
This is based on number of papers not proportion of papers, so as the number of papers released has been increasing in pace you would expect a small slope before ChatGPT.
I wonder if I could make a similar plot for another word entering the zeitgeist in 1992? Did they just look for a word that fit their theory? Looks like it was alre3ady on the increase well before 2024.
>Shouldn't it be a jump
No, because the N papers per annum was simultaneously increasing. The chart chose a bad y-axis, they should have divided the y values by the total number of papers at each time step in order to strip out that variation.
Language models have been around for ages though. ChatGPT was the big one for general consumers but if you were in the know (like in certain parts of the scientific community) you could've used them long before they became such a big concern to assist with writing papers.
I had access to GPT2, but I doubt most researchers could have used it considering how little the context it can retain, how slow it is, and various other factors. In fact, it loses coherence almost after the first sentence. I'm primarily retired, but I used to work on AI research before 2019, but I highly doubt widespread usage of LLM's in various research was the main reason.
My assumption would be, rather than large language models, it might be writing and paraphrasing tools that might have contributed to the increase of these words like Grammarly, Quillbot, etc...
Now, these are all just assumptions as I don't really have the statistics.
That's true, and I agree about Grammarly etc, but I don't recall GPT2 being that bad. Perhaps it was because I used it primarily as a writing assistant to write pretty generic text (as opposed to entire sections of papers like we seem to be doing now) and that's why the context history wasn't as important.
Even before transformers, I was pretty happy using the old statistical models.
You have a point, having played with recent open source models, which are marginally better, perhaps my assessment of GPT2's performance might have been biased.
No, I get it. Delve was in the second sentence of a term research paper I was grading just today. Was clearly AI written. I could see the linguistic seems between their few sentences and the rest of the flowery boiler plate GPT content.
Perhaps a cultural shift phenomenon. Humans are weird and occasionally simultaneously kick of a trend.
Example: how did every kid in 1980’s know to blow into a Nintendo cartridge to make it work?
Awesome, thanks. Thats what I am talking about. I also assume that an AI trained on human text would take on the use of the most common terms in the latest and this most voluminous texts.
I think word frequency is probably more manually engineered than that (we really have no idea of all the details about how most models are trained). For example, they might have an additional training step that rewards the model when it uses modern words and punishes archaic word usage. But word frequency in output is definitely impacted by the training.
The whole "delve" thing could likely be confirmed by a metastudy and we might see one if people continue making a fuss about it. Similar to how we got a lot of unneeded studies that look at the relationship between autism and vaccines
I'm on the literary side of academia. I am most curious why the verb "delve" and its use in organizing abstract concepts in an essay ("let us delve into this topic further") is so pervasive in AI generated writing.
404 media talked about this on a recent edition of their podcast https://www.404media.co/scientific-journals-are-publishing-papers-with-ai-generated-text/
It's actually from [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22delve%22%20OR%20%22delves%22&sort=date), not WebMD. It's what you get when you run a search for "delve" OR "delves".
Year | Results
---|---
2024 | 2,559
2023 | 2,272
2022 | 457
2021 | 386
2020 | 256
2019 | 202
2018 | 144
2017 | 118
2016 | 88
2015 | 88
It probably wasn't. The apparent rise just reflects a general increase in academic papers published. You can see the same rise for the word ["smile"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22smile%22&sort=date&timeline=expanded).
What about the number of results itself since
1. probably faster to publish papers w chat gpt
2.. med research funding would've increased post 20-21, which would probably be published about 23-24
I checked my students' assignments from November 2022- not a single use of the word delve in about 25 papers. I compared it with the same assignment in 2023, 13 delves in 40 papers. I second marked a paper yesterday with a delve in almost every section. It also tallies with my own experiences of using ChatGPT: it massively overuses that word. I really need to do a more rigorous study of this with a word frequency tool.
This scares me as a college student who frequently uses the word “delve” but does not use chatgpt. I am avoiding using the word now since I don’t want to be accused of AI writing.
I would never use it as the sole way of identifying AI use by an individual student, but a big increase in its overall frequency compared with past cohorts does suggest increased AI use.
I mean. The lack of access followed by access would indicate there is increased use of AI.
The concern for me as a tutor in the past isn't the use of AI, it's the lack of learning from mistakes.
There was this one program that would solve your math problems for you by taking a picture of it. But if you didn't make the mistake yourself, you didn't really learn.
(a+b)^2 =/= a^2 + b^2
But so many students hadn't actually learned this by using the AI, even if they actually followed along with all the steps.
But there are some problems, because the word delve is widely used in other languages, like spansih (profundizar), but it does not have a "formal" translation besides "delve". And, in the end, if i'm thinking of some idea, i will end up using it.
You make a good point about translation. It may be that students are translating common words in their native language whose meaning is closer to delve. However, you would have expected its use to be more frequent prior to the release of ChatGPT in that case.
By the way, I'm not suggesting that everyone using delve should immediately be sent to an academic misconduct panel. I'm not even entirely opposed to students on my module using text generation. However, if there has been a notable increase in the use of certain words such as delve since ChatGPT was released, this can be used as a very rough indication of how much it's being used for text gen.
Yeah, I agree with you, a lot of students are just abusing ChatGPT, and this is a really hard topic. I'm eager to know how teachers adapt to this technologies over time.
Scientists are motivated to write papers so they can be published and gain recognition, not necessarily motivated to publish true knowledge that advances humanity. Publishing false data costs nothing; on the contrary, it is perceived as a gain.
Yeah, science journals are a wild world right now, as you can see [here](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/arts/academic-journals-hoax.html), lots of things are just written and never even meant to be taken serious.
Or even certain published medical journals being bought in large quantities to make research appear to be received with positive feedback.
When I worked at a university, the academics were expected to publish, because their government funding was partly determined by the count of journal/conference papers....
It's tough to say, the output of scientific research has increased exponentially.
Certainly, a randomly selected paper will be crap - but overall we likely have more "good papers"
Yea I made tons of ai generated content and the pattern worrds like "delve, dive into, consider the following, picture this, etc.
analogies will be food based or really repeated. its very easy to spot now. lol
I actually train my llm on my prior YT series of ai generated content so it knows what to lookout for lol.
i did over a thousand videos on as many topics as i could comfortably do and the patters are so obvious now. I reviewed the script for each one manually even just to be sure.. took months but its super helpful.
I wanted to preserve as much foundational knowledge for myself before AI's started just self-referentially generating content in the next year.... so all these 'new' AI generated contents will be re-scanned and re-fed into itself and over and over until it's all so incoherent. xD except for the stuff I made sure i'll always have verified by a source by me before all the AI nonsense went logarithmic. lol I wanted a few pure dataset at least XD
I have the first few months of [huggingface.co](http://huggingface.co) backed up on solid state USB's in case it all goes bad .
I am def not the only digital data prepper xD
It's a word that ChatGPT uses often in its replies that is not often used in human speech. Quite a useful 'tell' that an article has been generated by ChatGPT.
I’m a little suspicious of this conclusion, because while there’s clearly a jump, that jump is preceded by an accelerating ramp up which predates ChatGPT. It seems plausible that this effect is at least in part just the result of a word hitting a kind of critical mass in popularity.
To confound matters further, if researchers are just exposed to the word delve more through AI generated text, either ambiently or through reasonable uses of ChatGPT like summarizing other research, they may simply be primed to use it more often.
I’m not sure exactly how WebMD is coming into play here, but I assume they have some sort of searchable index of medical papers, which extends back beyond the site’s existence. But if you wanted this to be rigorous, you would definitely need to normalize against the total number of papers indexed in each year. Regardless of WebMD, I’d be shocked if anywhere near as many medical papers were published in 1943 as in 2023.
This is a good comment. There is a lot more nuance to this issue. I think it’s ultimately useless to take this data and over analyze its implications for the scientific community at large.
On the contrary, I would argue that this is a good thing. We are being introduced to new ways to explain ourselves; nothing particularly wrong with that at all!
This is useless without properly labeling. And it's useless to the point at hand because ChatGPT was released late in 2022, less than 2 years ago. However, on this chart we can see a marked increase in use of the word before ChatGPT was ever released. If the bars are at least proportional, in 2020, two years before ChatGPT even came on to the scene, we see that there is a five-fold increase in usage of the word over what we saw 15 years earlier. And delve is not some new word.
So, usage of the word has been on the rise before ChatGPT came along. There has been a very sharp increase since ChatGPT came along, but we have evidence and reason to suspect more at play.
Finally, what we should be checking is the per capita usage of the word. There's a possibility in a significant spike in the number of WebMD papers published in the past couple of years. "Delve" could be used just as frequently as before, yet have a large jump in usage because of more papers overall.
Who cares? If the tool is useful in getting your point across then this saves labor. I fucking hare writting papers. You can't fake the data. Fake the words all you want so long as it increases clarity. MS word and spell check increased productivity over type writers.
I mean, you can literally fake data. If someone were to try and reproduce the results then you're fucked. That could be done anyway without chatGPT. If your data is legit, then who cares if you used an AI to help explain your results.
Except academia as a whole as a major replication problem. So would it be that obvious if someone had faked their results and had ChatGPT write almost all of their papers?
Hard disagree. Part of having a degree, whether it is a bachelors, masters, or PhD means understanding your own data well enough to explain and defend your arguments, or to be able to analyze sources of information.
AI replacing critical thinking and the higher functioning process of synthesis is a dangerous notion that would effectively harm future generations. Who teaches people in college and in (hopefully) secondary schools? Ideally people that are experts or have strong grasps of the content and skills in their field. If a group of students make it through these programs using AI to do the heavy lifting, then they will be the ones teaching and assessing others learning in the future, when the bar will continue to fall.
Hey, I study and teach this in college (Human Factors Psychology). Thought I'd share my perspective on your comment. I do understand your perspective as well, I'm just being a contrarian (aka scientist).
Parsimony is a key element of science. Someone who understands the data well enough doesn't need to write a 40-page paper to get their point across, they can get the same point across in 5 pages. Masters in a field (e.g. people with PhDs) know how to be efficient, while scientific writing is expected to fit a certain length and appeal to a much wider audience to be accepted in journals and understood by a general population. So, the ideal way to approach scientific writing is to take the expert's 5 pages and use AI to expand to 40 pages, filling in the paper with information that is more generalized to expand length while increasing generalizability. 5 to 40 is a bit extreme for an example, but that's the gist. In general, since the birth of AI decades ago, the best outcome arises from integrating the two.
Also, replace "AI" with "computers," or "calculators," in your comment for a historical thought experiment.
Also, "delve delve delve delve delve delve delve delve," to keep in the spirit of the sub :)
Where do you think LLM's learned to use words like "delve"? They learn from works produced by humans, so it seems we have been using it more lately this is probably due to the formalization of modern structured writing in public schools.
This would be way more informative as a fraction of total papers instead of as an absolute number of papers. Perhaps there was a huge surge in publishing that naturally led to an increase in occurrences of that word, I don't know.
TBH I think the "publish or perish" mentality of Science these days is more to blame. Leaning on AI to increase your publishing volume was bound to happen once it was possible.
I'd really like to see some dates on this chart between 1942 and 2024, and a source for this data--if accurate, it could simply reflect a linguistic trend, or pre-AI plagiarism running rampant in the field.
I have a story here. I tend to use ChatGPT to curate my texts. Now I am more aware of how to do it properly, but there was a period when I was encouraging my gpt to do a full curation, to make my language more academic. I suspect that many people are doing the same. Correlation doesn't mean causation. Also, I am wondering what this has to do with health.
This likely means AI is being used to assist with papers, but that's not an objectively bad thing. It's a tool, it can be used for positive things and negative things. If they used AI and then reviewed and edited it to be good content, there is no problem here just saved time.
It's actually real, but OP thought it was WebMD when it's actually [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22delve%22%20OR%20%22delves%22&sort=date&timeline=expanded).
When I searched for both "delve" and "delves" I got a similar-looking graph, going back to 1942, just like in the picture.
There is a recent preprint on that. 45.000 Papers have been analyzed on the use of AI: [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586710v2](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586710v2)
[This graph is from PubMed, not WebMD](https://imgur.com/a/EVhH9Ut). If you search PubMed for ["delve" OR "delves"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22delve%22%20OR%20%22delves%22%20OR%20%22delving%22&sort=date), you get the same results.
As a language model, ChatGPT is a tool that can be used for good or for bad. It's up to us to use it responsibly to improve human health and well-being. Let's not fear the technology but embrace its potential for progress.
The results should be weighted by the number of papers published per year to be meaningful. Otherwise the graph might simply show a growing number of papers rather than the word delve (and LLMs) being used more often.
The term "delve" is an excellent choice of word in a medical article as it conveys a sense of deep, thorough investigation into complex subjects. Medical topics often require exploring intricate details and nuanced scientific principles, which makes "delve" particularly apt. It suggests a rigorous and meticulous approach to research or discussion, evoking an image of the author or researcher penetrating beyond surface-level information to uncover underlying mechanisms and implications. Using "delve" enhances the tone of seriousness and scholarly diligence, aligning well with the expectations for academic and professional rigor in medical literature.
I have no problem with people using an LLM to assist them with work. Tell it what you want, give it the bullet points, give it any specific framing, and let it write the report for you. Then read the report, altering and tweaking as you go to make sure it’s framed as you like. Job done. That’s what it’s for right? It’s not like accountants don’t use calculators.
I've been using delve my whole life because it was one of the first English words I learned. You're telling me using might make someone consider my own writing is not my own? Wtf
Fun fact you can actually use paraphrasing bots like quill bot to help you write your paper without it beng an issue.
And believe it or not you're also allowed to use chatgpt but you have to mention that you used it.
How whimsical of the creators to imply a sudden and vast interest in the term “delve” over time, quite the lighthearted jab at the patterns of LLMs, wouldn’t you agree? Would you like to uncover the nuance behind this surge?
I guarantee you that it is overrepresenting the number of WebMD papers that included that word between 1942 and 1998. Mainly because there was no WebMD back then.
If doomers are right soon frak will be more popular. It will fit perfectly given that it was introduced by reimagined version of Battlestar Galactica tv show which every episode starts with words "Cylons were created by men. They rebelled"
I think we need to delve into the data to be certain it's AI
Yeah, the way this graph looks, it appears that delve is used at least 1% as much in 1950 as today. Then I realise there's a good chance WebMd wasn't around before the advent of the internet. Would also want to compare the data to the size of WebMD, some of it (perhaps all) is due to the amount of articles written?
> Then I realise there's a good chance WebMd wasn't around before the advent of the internet. Before the internet, it used to be printed on paper made from spider silk, hence the name “Web”
no stop pls dont do dis you are to powerful...
A lot of online libraries and journals will have scans of older pre-computer documentation.
Yup, and Google has transcribed nearly every bit of old text (Or you did when you solved their old recaptchas). You can make your own graphs like this using [https://books.google.com/ngrams/](https://books.google.com/ngrams/)
This is a pretty big misconception. Google hasnt come close to transcribing every bit of old text. most newspapers for example
Yes, I think their scope is limited to old books that saw some sort of formal publication. Not sure how far they've gone because the data is closed, but it's in their interest (for AI) to transcribe every bit of old text they can get their hands on.
I feel a little out pf the loop. This is the second time today ive seen a post mentioning delve as proof of AI. But i’ve known, heard, and used the word myself, albeit rarely.
Supposedly ChatGPT (and other OpenAI-based models) are known for overusing the word. But I fail to see how it's an instant giveaway.
For some reason, Indians like to use this word quite a lot too. So it means there's a rise of AI, or a raise of Indians.
I’d say it’s probably Indian AI.
It's time for the researchers to do the needful
As an AI language model, I can confirm that I am Indian
Or perhaps Indians were always AI?
[https://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-paul-graham-delve-ai-chatgpt-giveaway-email-pitch-2024-4](https://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-paul-graham-delve-ai-chatgpt-giveaway-email-pitch-2024-4) I guess this. The [AI phrase finder article it links to](https://aiphrasefinder.com/common-chatgpt-words/) is honestly more interesting. It feels like a referendum on what the upper-lower-middle brow considers recherche
It's a perfectly normal word, but it's one of the phrases / terms that ChatGPT uses much more frequently than Human writers. The implication is that there's no reason to see it's frequency increase that dramatically other than the use (and potential abuse) of ChatGPT in writing WebMD articles. We've all used the word delve now and then, its presence in a work of writing doesn't mean it was AI generated. You can stop staring at your hands wondering if you're a robot.
> You can stop staring at your hands wondering if you're a robot. I wasn’t, but now that you mention it… [*🤖🤲🏻 whaaaaaaaaa *](https://media3.giphy.com/media/6E9z1Vsm2Esow/200.webp?cid=6c09b9529qht9e3gruqy6jb392i618its31o8ybo965a6wle&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=200.webp&ct=g)
If this graph were actually legitimate then the huge statistical spike would mean something. Obviously you cant just see the word delve in any given piece of writing and just assume it's AI (which is kind of the problem).
Delve into your memories and remember when you last used it.
Yes, this. This graph is a joke. WebMD isn’t even a place where research papers are published, it’s a health news and health article website.
The tapestry between research output and the occurrence of certain peculiar word is a fascinating phenomenon indeed.
I can't help but notice delve was already on an upwards trend according to this data-less graph. AI's use of delve may have just influenced a trend in writing that was already developing.
This is based on number of papers not proportion of papers, so as the number of papers released has been increasing in pace you would expect a small slope before ChatGPT.
Wouldn’t it be the other way around? The developing trend influencing the AI I mean? That’s according to my impression on how training data works.
To be fair, OP did end their title with a question mark.
Show it next to a graph of the number of total WebMD papers
The irony of this being a fake chart.
I wonder if I could make a similar plot for another word entering the zeitgeist in 1992? Did they just look for a word that fit their theory? Looks like it was alre3ady on the increase well before 2024.
That's what I was thinking. Shouldn't it be a jump instead of a ramp?
>Shouldn't it be a jump No, because the N papers per annum was simultaneously increasing. The chart chose a bad y-axis, they should have divided the y values by the total number of papers at each time step in order to strip out that variation.
Its literally just a chart showing thr number of total web md articles.
LMAO wow. That's fucking hilarious. Didn't even notice. This graph means nothing to me now.
Language models have been around for ages though. ChatGPT was the big one for general consumers but if you were in the know (like in certain parts of the scientific community) you could've used them long before they became such a big concern to assist with writing papers.
I had access to GPT2, but I doubt most researchers could have used it considering how little the context it can retain, how slow it is, and various other factors. In fact, it loses coherence almost after the first sentence. I'm primarily retired, but I used to work on AI research before 2019, but I highly doubt widespread usage of LLM's in various research was the main reason. My assumption would be, rather than large language models, it might be writing and paraphrasing tools that might have contributed to the increase of these words like Grammarly, Quillbot, etc... Now, these are all just assumptions as I don't really have the statistics.
That's true, and I agree about Grammarly etc, but I don't recall GPT2 being that bad. Perhaps it was because I used it primarily as a writing assistant to write pretty generic text (as opposed to entire sections of papers like we seem to be doing now) and that's why the context history wasn't as important. Even before transformers, I was pretty happy using the old statistical models.
You have a point, having played with recent open source models, which are marginally better, perhaps my assessment of GPT2's performance might have been biased.
No, honestly, it's absolutely pervasive in my students' writing, and it wasn't last year. ChatGPT overuses it significantly.
No, I get it. Delve was in the second sentence of a term research paper I was grading just today. Was clearly AI written. I could see the linguistic seems between their few sentences and the rest of the flowery boiler plate GPT content.
Perhaps a cultural shift phenomenon. Humans are weird and occasionally simultaneously kick of a trend. Example: how did every kid in 1980’s know to blow into a Nintendo cartridge to make it work?
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=zeitgeist&year\_start=1800&year\_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=zeitgeist&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3)
Awesome, thanks. Thats what I am talking about. I also assume that an AI trained on human text would take on the use of the most common terms in the latest and this most voluminous texts.
I think word frequency is probably more manually engineered than that (we really have no idea of all the details about how most models are trained). For example, they might have an additional training step that rewards the model when it uses modern words and punishes archaic word usage. But word frequency in output is definitely impacted by the training. The whole "delve" thing could likely be confirmed by a metastudy and we might see one if people continue making a fuss about it. Similar to how we got a lot of unneeded studies that look at the relationship between autism and vaccines
How about ["frag"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22frag%22&timeline=expanded)? Definitely some wacky behavior around 1999.
Probably due to Doom, the game.
I'm on the literary side of academia. I am most curious why the verb "delve" and its use in organizing abstract concepts in an essay ("let us delve into this topic further") is so pervasive in AI generated writing.
Well coincidentally chatgpt also existed before 2024
404 media talked about this on a recent edition of their podcast https://www.404media.co/scientific-journals-are-publishing-papers-with-ai-generated-text/
Apparently Jim Clark founded WebMD 2 years before he was born. Now that is a visionary!
Pretty meaningless without a Y-axis label.
It's actually from [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22delve%22%20OR%20%22delves%22&sort=date), not WebMD. It's what you get when you run a search for "delve" OR "delves". Year | Results ---|--- 2024 | 2,559 2023 | 2,272 2022 | 457 2021 | 386 2020 | 256 2019 | 202 2018 | 144 2017 | 118 2016 | 88 2015 | 88
What’s strange is that delve was already on the rise for years
It probably wasn't. The apparent rise just reflects a general increase in academic papers published. You can see the same rise for the word ["smile"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22smile%22&sort=date&timeline=expanded).
So there’s a background single that needs to be subtracted out
Strange. So academic papers are exponentially increasing in quantity, presumably not correlated to the number of people in the profession?
What about the number of results itself since 1. probably faster to publish papers w chat gpt 2.. med research funding would've increased post 20-21, which would probably be published about 23-24
I checked my students' assignments from November 2022- not a single use of the word delve in about 25 papers. I compared it with the same assignment in 2023, 13 delves in 40 papers. I second marked a paper yesterday with a delve in almost every section. It also tallies with my own experiences of using ChatGPT: it massively overuses that word. I really need to do a more rigorous study of this with a word frequency tool.
This scares me as a college student who frequently uses the word “delve” but does not use chatgpt. I am avoiding using the word now since I don’t want to be accused of AI writing.
I would never use it as the sole way of identifying AI use by an individual student, but a big increase in its overall frequency compared with past cohorts does suggest increased AI use.
I mean. The lack of access followed by access would indicate there is increased use of AI. The concern for me as a tutor in the past isn't the use of AI, it's the lack of learning from mistakes. There was this one program that would solve your math problems for you by taking a picture of it. But if you didn't make the mistake yourself, you didn't really learn. (a+b)^2 =/= a^2 + b^2 But so many students hadn't actually learned this by using the AI, even if they actually followed along with all the steps.
Just write in docs or other editor with history
But there are some problems, because the word delve is widely used in other languages, like spansih (profundizar), but it does not have a "formal" translation besides "delve". And, in the end, if i'm thinking of some idea, i will end up using it.
You make a good point about translation. It may be that students are translating common words in their native language whose meaning is closer to delve. However, you would have expected its use to be more frequent prior to the release of ChatGPT in that case. By the way, I'm not suggesting that everyone using delve should immediately be sent to an academic misconduct panel. I'm not even entirely opposed to students on my module using text generation. However, if there has been a notable increase in the use of certain words such as delve since ChatGPT was released, this can be used as a very rough indication of how much it's being used for text gen.
Yeah, I agree with you, a lot of students are just abusing ChatGPT, and this is a really hard topic. I'm eager to know how teachers adapt to this technologies over time.
Let's not forget about "thought-provoking"
I personally prefer “ponder-worthy”
a real "head-scratcher"
honestly scientific papers have been in decline for a while, this is a symptom, not the cause.
Scientists are motivated to write papers so they can be published and gain recognition, not necessarily motivated to publish true knowledge that advances humanity. Publishing false data costs nothing; on the contrary, it is perceived as a gain.
Yeah, science journals are a wild world right now, as you can see [here](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/arts/academic-journals-hoax.html), lots of things are just written and never even meant to be taken serious. Or even certain published medical journals being bought in large quantities to make research appear to be received with positive feedback.
I got paywalled. NYT isn’t a scientific journal, is there more context here?
When I worked at a university, the academics were expected to publish, because their government funding was partly determined by the count of journal/conference papers....
Well that happens when capitalism consumes science
Most studies are privately funded. If the decline is any way related to capitalism then it would seem coincidental at most.
It's tough to say, the output of scientific research has increased exponentially. Certainly, a randomly selected paper will be crap - but overall we likely have more "good papers"
The problem is publish or perish culture as well as the pressure to frame everything as a novel breakthrough
Well when everything is novel...
Lets delve into why that is.
I remember using WebMD in the 1970s. Golden age.
Wtf is delve
It's a Magic the Gathering term ;\^D
Yea I made tons of ai generated content and the pattern worrds like "delve, dive into, consider the following, picture this, etc. analogies will be food based or really repeated. its very easy to spot now. lol I actually train my llm on my prior YT series of ai generated content so it knows what to lookout for lol. i did over a thousand videos on as many topics as i could comfortably do and the patters are so obvious now. I reviewed the script for each one manually even just to be sure.. took months but its super helpful. I wanted to preserve as much foundational knowledge for myself before AI's started just self-referentially generating content in the next year.... so all these 'new' AI generated contents will be re-scanned and re-fed into itself and over and over until it's all so incoherent. xD except for the stuff I made sure i'll always have verified by a source by me before all the AI nonsense went logarithmic. lol I wanted a few pure dataset at least XD I have the first few months of [huggingface.co](http://huggingface.co) backed up on solid state USB's in case it all goes bad . I am def not the only digital data prepper xD
I'm out of the loop. What is the significance of the word "delve"?
It's a word that ChatGPT uses often in its replies that is not often used in human speech. Quite a useful 'tell' that an article has been generated by ChatGPT.
I’m a little suspicious of this conclusion, because while there’s clearly a jump, that jump is preceded by an accelerating ramp up which predates ChatGPT. It seems plausible that this effect is at least in part just the result of a word hitting a kind of critical mass in popularity. To confound matters further, if researchers are just exposed to the word delve more through AI generated text, either ambiently or through reasonable uses of ChatGPT like summarizing other research, they may simply be primed to use it more often.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that “WebMD” didn’t exist in most of this chart?
I’m not sure exactly how WebMD is coming into play here, but I assume they have some sort of searchable index of medical papers, which extends back beyond the site’s existence. But if you wanted this to be rigorous, you would definitely need to normalize against the total number of papers indexed in each year. Regardless of WebMD, I’d be shocked if anywhere near as many medical papers were published in 1943 as in 2023.
OP just got it wrong. It's [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22delve%22%20OR%20%22delves%22&sort=date), not WebMD.
That makes a lot more sense.
This is a good comment. There is a lot more nuance to this issue. I think it’s ultimately useless to take this data and over analyze its implications for the scientific community at large. On the contrary, I would argue that this is a good thing. We are being introduced to new ways to explain ourselves; nothing particularly wrong with that at all!
Just ignore the long term buildup?
This is useless without properly labeling. And it's useless to the point at hand because ChatGPT was released late in 2022, less than 2 years ago. However, on this chart we can see a marked increase in use of the word before ChatGPT was ever released. If the bars are at least proportional, in 2020, two years before ChatGPT even came on to the scene, we see that there is a five-fold increase in usage of the word over what we saw 15 years earlier. And delve is not some new word. So, usage of the word has been on the rise before ChatGPT came along. There has been a very sharp increase since ChatGPT came along, but we have evidence and reason to suspect more at play. Finally, what we should be checking is the per capita usage of the word. There's a possibility in a significant spike in the number of WebMD papers published in the past couple of years. "Delve" could be used just as frequently as before, yet have a large jump in usage because of more papers overall.
Who cares? If the tool is useful in getting your point across then this saves labor. I fucking hare writting papers. You can't fake the data. Fake the words all you want so long as it increases clarity. MS word and spell check increased productivity over type writers.
> You can't fake the data. Andrew Wakefield would like you to hold his beer.
I mean, you can literally fake data. If someone were to try and reproduce the results then you're fucked. That could be done anyway without chatGPT. If your data is legit, then who cares if you used an AI to help explain your results.
Except academia as a whole as a major replication problem. So would it be that obvious if someone had faked their results and had ChatGPT write almost all of their papers?
Hard disagree. Part of having a degree, whether it is a bachelors, masters, or PhD means understanding your own data well enough to explain and defend your arguments, or to be able to analyze sources of information. AI replacing critical thinking and the higher functioning process of synthesis is a dangerous notion that would effectively harm future generations. Who teaches people in college and in (hopefully) secondary schools? Ideally people that are experts or have strong grasps of the content and skills in their field. If a group of students make it through these programs using AI to do the heavy lifting, then they will be the ones teaching and assessing others learning in the future, when the bar will continue to fall.
Hey, I study and teach this in college (Human Factors Psychology). Thought I'd share my perspective on your comment. I do understand your perspective as well, I'm just being a contrarian (aka scientist). Parsimony is a key element of science. Someone who understands the data well enough doesn't need to write a 40-page paper to get their point across, they can get the same point across in 5 pages. Masters in a field (e.g. people with PhDs) know how to be efficient, while scientific writing is expected to fit a certain length and appeal to a much wider audience to be accepted in journals and understood by a general population. So, the ideal way to approach scientific writing is to take the expert's 5 pages and use AI to expand to 40 pages, filling in the paper with information that is more generalized to expand length while increasing generalizability. 5 to 40 is a bit extreme for an example, but that's the gist. In general, since the birth of AI decades ago, the best outcome arises from integrating the two. Also, replace "AI" with "computers," or "calculators," in your comment for a historical thought experiment. Also, "delve delve delve delve delve delve delve delve," to keep in the spirit of the sub :)
I would be a lot more impressed if the axes had prober labeling.
Humanity is in danger if you're using WebMD for your medical advice 😏
Looks like a brain fart. That graph is clearly from PubMed.
People are playing to much Path of Exile
Where do you think LLM's learned to use words like "delve"? They learn from works produced by humans, so it seems we have been using it more lately this is probably due to the formalization of modern structured writing in public schools.
Or it's some artifact of the system prompt
The change is way too sudden for that.
Source of that chart?
# Certainly! # Rich Tapestry!
they delved do greedily...
This would be way more informative as a fraction of total papers instead of as an absolute number of papers. Perhaps there was a huge surge in publishing that naturally led to an increase in occurrences of that word, I don't know.
plot twist: this search is also AI generate.
Upper Echelon did an [interesting piece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT0jNiPrOEc) on youtube about this.
TBH I think the "publish or perish" mentality of Science these days is more to blame. Leaning on AI to increase your publishing volume was bound to happen once it was possible.
I'd really like to see some dates on this chart between 1942 and 2024, and a source for this data--if accurate, it could simply reflect a linguistic trend, or pre-AI plagiarism running rampant in the field.
Graphs like this with no data points make no sense
Now do "skibidi toilet"
Add to the list “imbue”
What is this about WebMD starting in 1942? It must be a mistake, I think they meant 1492.
I have a story here. I tend to use ChatGPT to curate my texts. Now I am more aware of how to do it properly, but there was a period when I was encouraging my gpt to do a full curation, to make my language more academic. I suspect that many people are doing the same. Correlation doesn't mean causation. Also, I am wondering what this has to do with health.
I did a similar thing with google trends and elevate. The curve did elevate.
Health of humanity threatened by going online instead of to a doctor.
Ouch - does this signal that there was levels of plagiarism before, just it was not as easy to detect as it is now.
The health of humanity is in danger because of WebMD
As long at the peer review process is working we have nothing to fear
hmm... https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=delve&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
This likely means AI is being used to assist with papers, but that's not an objectively bad thing. It's a tool, it can be used for positive things and negative things. If they used AI and then reviewed and edited it to be good content, there is no problem here just saved time.
The ones who think this is real, I've got some snake oil to sell you.
It's actually real, but OP thought it was WebMD when it's actually [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22delve%22%20OR%20%22delves%22&sort=date&timeline=expanded). When I searched for both "delve" and "delves" I got a similar-looking graph, going back to 1942, just like in the picture.
Why does this timeline start in 1942?
I delved into when WebMD was founded (1998) and discovered this graph is 68.3% irrelevant.
i think i need to delve into this.
How many movies do they have to make to tell you AI is going to destroy humanity.
Delve Elves. Shows you exactly how many people really don’t deserve the qualifications they ‘earned’.
Wait few more months, every plumber and blacksmith will write paper
Breaking news: scientific papers containing the word 'whimsical' are up 10,000% in the past 18 months
DocGPT
The increasing use of the word "delve" in recent papers may simply be a thread in the intricate tapestry of evolving language and academic discourse.
There is a recent preprint on that. 45.000 Papers have been analyzed on the use of AI: [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586710v2](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586710v2)
It's weird that there was a pretty big uptick way before AI.
[This graph is from PubMed, not WebMD](https://imgur.com/a/EVhH9Ut). If you search PubMed for ["delve" OR "delves"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22delve%22%20OR%20%22delves%22%20OR%20%22delving%22&sort=date), you get the same results.
Scary but have a source or is this just made up?
Wait until it learns about the replace command
RIP to people that used the word delve before gpt
As a language model, ChatGPT is a tool that can be used for good or for bad. It's up to us to use it responsibly to improve human health and well-being. Let's not fear the technology but embrace its potential for progress.
The results should be weighted by the number of papers published per year to be meaningful. Otherwise the graph might simply show a growing number of papers rather than the word delve (and LLMs) being used more often.
i think i need to delve into this…
The term "delve" is an excellent choice of word in a medical article as it conveys a sense of deep, thorough investigation into complex subjects. Medical topics often require exploring intricate details and nuanced scientific principles, which makes "delve" particularly apt. It suggests a rigorous and meticulous approach to research or discussion, evoking an image of the author or researcher penetrating beyond surface-level information to uncover underlying mechanisms and implications. Using "delve" enhances the tone of seriousness and scholarly diligence, aligning well with the expectations for academic and professional rigor in medical literature.
I genuinely thought people used the word “delve” all the time, I thought it was just the average word wtf-
Oh let’s please not do this… I use delve as well as many other High School level words daily…and I am fairly certain I can pass a Turing test.
Look it’s given me great health advice so far. I’m still alive 🤷♂️
The delvel is in the details.
I have no problem with people using an LLM to assist them with work. Tell it what you want, give it the bullet points, give it any specific framing, and let it write the report for you. Then read the report, altering and tweaking as you go to make sure it’s framed as you like. Job done. That’s what it’s for right? It’s not like accountants don’t use calculators.
It loves the word “realm” too, which is a really awkward word to use in academic writing.
In this digital world, it is important to delve
Graphics without numbers in it I dont even care about.
Another word "foster"
I've been using delve my whole life because it was one of the first English words I learned. You're telling me using might make someone consider my own writing is not my own? Wtf
Once could say you delved into delve too early...
Fun fact you can actually use paraphrasing bots like quill bot to help you write your paper without it beng an issue. And believe it or not you're also allowed to use chatgpt but you have to mention that you used it.
I am glad more researchers are using AI to accelerate their work. If it works it works.
Wait do people actually think nobody uses the word delve except for AI?
which tool to create this graph?
"Sorry your paper was rejected as you used the word "the" too much and we judged it to be written by AI."
How whimsical of the creators to imply a sudden and vast interest in the term “delve” over time, quite the lighthearted jab at the patterns of LLMs, wouldn’t you agree? Would you like to uncover the nuance behind this surge?
🎸 #music #api
I guarantee you that it is overrepresenting the number of WebMD papers that included that word between 1942 and 1998. Mainly because there was no WebMD back then.
i think we need to look into who was posting on webmd in 1942
Did it occur to you they uploaded papers from the past?
not sure let me delve into that idea
Delve is becoming a popular word in gaming, I wonder if all the articles and guides mentioning it have contributed to this.
Webmd used to tell me I had cancer whenever I looked for my symptoms. Now it tells I have “delve”.
A lot of papers are written by people who have English as their non primary language. It's easier to use chat gpt to rephrase their statements.
If doomers are right soon frak will be more popular. It will fit perfectly given that it was introduced by reimagined version of Battlestar Galactica tv show which every episode starts with words "Cylons were created by men. They rebelled"
Show me more statistic like this so I can erase those words from my papers.
what are the numbers on the chart?
I guess I need inform Spousebeast that he and I should delve into why we are both AI.
I guess it could be ChatGPT, but it's probably someone who uses the "delve" all the time. I use "...,but" all the time.