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Comment by dougb5 | Hacker News Reader

After late '22 I noticed a surge in superlatives like "vital", "essential", "crucial", and "pivotal" in essays and cover letters from students. ChatGPT uses words like these whenever you ask it to write an essay, and it's a dead giveaway. It's ruined the legitimate uses of the words.

Pick one of the Google Scholar results from the article and you'll find something awful like this (the start of the second paper): "The carriage of goods under international commercial law is a complex and essential aspect of international trade."

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> surge in superlatives like "vital", "essential", "crucial", and "pivotal"

This is very interesting. It could also be an effect of Grammarly, which suggests these replacements for the generic "important." Perhaps it's a combination of several effects.

My guess is that ChatGPT does it because RLHF rewards strongly stated opinions, because that's what humans prefer. It's a kind of "sycophantic behavior" that researchers have observed in these models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548)

To be fair, replacing "important" with some less generic synonym is like one of the first tips in any Copy Editing for Dummies book, and definitely suggested by Grammarly, for example.

Any word can become generic when overused. As more people get access to Grammarly and CharGPT, more of them will apply the same recommendations, turning previously rare words into generics.

True – I almost added that the advice itself has almost become a cliché.

Chose your words carefully, if lucky you might find some that only fit you.

Thus therefore to provide an example thereof one may replaces all instances of "important" or "essential" with "splendid", "brilliant" "magnificent","gorgeous" or "sophisticated".

—"The carriage of goods under international commercial law is a sophisticated and gorgeous aspect of international trade."

If I specifically tell ChatGPT to not use language like that it completely ignores my direction and does it anyway

You must be in some good writers' microcosm. A lot of human technical writers really write like that.

Heh, or maybe in some general sense, everything is essential, crucial, vital, constantly pivoting, etc., and these are the best words to use. Some day ChatGPT will tell me "I told you so!"

I've been interacting with ChatGPT and other LLMs so much I've already caught myself getting influenced by their word choice in the same way I might start subconsciously adopting the vocabulary of a friend. Food for thought .

How are ‘vital’, ‘essential’ and ‘pivotal’ superlatives?

"Superlative" can mean not just the grammatical category that includes "*est" words, but also, more informally, adjectives that live at an extreme, as "critical" does within the concept of "importance".

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