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Comment by doe_eyes | Hacker News Reader

> We show that the appearance of LLM-based writing assistants has had an unprecedented impact in the scientific literature, surpassing the effect of major world events such as the Covid pandemic.

I'm not quite sure this follows. At the very least, I think they should also consider the possibility of social contagion: if some of your colleagues start using a new word in work-related writing, you usually pick that up. The spread of "delve" was certainly bootstrapped by ChatGPT, but I'm not sure that the use of LLMs is the only possible explanation for its growing popularity.

Even in the pre-ChatGPT days, it was common for a new term to come out of nowhere and then spread like a wildfire in formal writing. "Utilize" for "use", etc.

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I have friends in academia (all around Europe and in different fields, from Spain to Danemark, Slovakia, Sweden, Germany, in economics, solid state physics, &c.), I can 100% guarantee you're wrong and chatgpt is now the default tool for the vast majority of people writing these papers.

It's not people picking up new words, you have to understand academia is mostly about shitting out as many papers as you can and make them as verbose as possible, it's the perfect use case for LLMs, this field was rotten before, chatgpt just makes it more obvious to the non academia crowd

For them not using chatgpt would be like sticking to sailboats while the world moved to steam engines

tangential, but I remember working in a school computer lab hours before my big paradise lost essay was due and putting an extra newline between all paragraphs to beef up the page length.

It sounds like you have anecdotal evidence from a bad side of academia. I also have many friends in academia across NA and Asia and have an impression closer to parent's.

> chatgpt is now the default tool for the vast majority of people writing these papers.

I'm in a similar sort of circle and I can say that this, though I've not measured rigorously, does strongly square with my own anecdotal experience, and it's especially prevalent with people whose first language is not English but have no choice but to publish (frequently) and apply for grants in English.

So many of the writing assistant tools customarily used for first-pass proofreading have gone straight into full LLM integration and no longer simply just check grammar and basic "elements of style" issues.

Also professional (human) proofreaders are fantastically expensive for the very limited amount of assistance date provide. A couple thousand dollars more (source for this number, a proofreader recommended by Oxford U Pub) for someone to fix some minor semantic redundancies in your 35 page book chapter wording is financially unreasonable for a lot of people in academia.

> academia is mostly about shitting out as many papers as you can

This is the classic case of publish-or-perish, since publication metrics are ubiquitous in all aspects of academic life unfortunately. Measuring true impact is the goal, but it is hard problem to solve for.

> and make them as verbose as possible

This is just laughably wrong. The page-limits are always too low to fit all the information one wants to include, so padding a text is just not of interest at all.

With that said, I wouldn't be surprised if people use ChatGPT a lot. If for no other reason most academics are writing in a language (English) that is not their native language and that is hard to do. Anything that makes the process of communicating ones results easier and more efficient is a good thing. Of course, it can also be used to create incomprehensible word salads, but I've seen a lot of those in the pre-LLM times as well.

Shitting out as many papers as you can, yes.

Making them as verbose as possible? My experience from grad school and with friends who are now faculty is that literally everybody's first draft is above the page limit and content needs to be cut.

There are a few language shifts that happened in the past few years. The use of the singular "they", "there's a few" instead of "there are a few", the "like" filler word, etc. It's not that unusual.

And some of the post-LLM cliches are almost certainly purely human in their memetic spread — "moat" and "stochastic parrot" in particular come to mind.

‘Moat’ is everywhere now, isn’t it? I thought it was just me.

Singular they has been around much more than the "past few years": https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/singular-nonbinary-...

> We will note that they has been in consistent use as a singular pronoun since the late 1300s; that the development of singular they mirrors the development of the singular you from the plural you, yet we don’t complain that singular you is ungrammatical; and that regardless of what detractors say, nearly everyone uses the singular they in casual conversation and often in formal writing.

OP didn't say it was invented recently, just that language has shifted to use it more.

I assume due to the societal shift to be less focused on gender.

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