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Comment by em3rgent0rdr | Hacker News Reader

"Delves", "potential", and "significant" all made a large increase. Those words also strike me as the non-committal weasel words Google's AI overview for Google searches tends to produce as the AI isn't really entirely sure it can make a definitive conclusion.

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"delves" is stereotypical LLM-ese to me. I don't think I've ever heard a real human use that word before LLMs became common.

Magic the Gathering players are intimately familiar with the term :)

I’ve only ever seen it used in magic the gathering

The dwarves of Moria are notable for having delved to excess.

I'd see it occasionally, usually in bullshit corporate writing replete with other buzzwords, which is probably where the LLMs picked up on it.

It seems it is common in Nigerian English, from where in ended up in AI datasets.

I think it’s from YouTube. “With that, we can delve into [topic]” was part of the vocabulary for video essays for years. It always joined an introduction’s closing thesis statement with the rest of the video content.

Delves has a huge increase because it's a new thing in WoW. That's why you see a big spike in Google trends. If you see an article that claims "delves" increase is because of LLMs, you can safely ignore anything else it has to say.

Fascinating to see that the word "important" dropped off in usage

Given the way generated text works, it makes sense it would less often highlight a directly important phrase or passage or detail, since it has no understanding of what it is writing.

Potential I’ll grant you, but how are significant and delves weasel words?

If you're reading a paper you're already delving. It's clearly filler.

What does "significant" mean? It means whatever I say it means, it's fairly useless as anything to convey a fact without a definition.

If I needed to program a light sensor to signal when it detects "significant" change in lighting, what does that mean? If I don't define it, it means nothing.

"Delve" is a style word, another category highlighted in the article as a signature of generated text.

I read it as "statistically significant", i.e. above noise/error level. Sounds pretty well defined to me, at least in a scientific paper.

The reason it is a weasel word is exactly this -- it is a word with an implied meaning, not an implicit one.

We aren't talking about "statistically significant" -- that carries meaning only if the statistic is explained, though.

Significant has a very specific meaning in statistics, which is going to come up in any biomedical research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance

Do you think an LLM takes this into account when it uses the word?

Is the context statistical? If so, then yes.

We clearly disagree, in that case - have you used LLMs?

The person I was replying to linked to a Wiki article on "statistical significance" which is not the word being used or discussed in this convo; did you note that before you replied?

You expect an AI to follow context, but the context switched here and none of the humans are seemingly pointing it out. I'd expect LESS of an LLM, not more.

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