ChatGPT wrote about it: experts found a word to identify AI content

Emails written by ChatGPT are very easy to identify — you only need to pay attention to one word.

Paul Graham, a co-founder of the popular American business incubator Y Combinator, came to the conclusion that the presence of the word «delve» in an email is a sign that it was written by ChatGPT.

Someone sent me a cold email proposing a novel project. Then I noticed it used the word “delve.”

— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 7, 2024

I have attached a diagram to this post. It shows the number of uses of this word exclusively in academic materials from 1990 to 2024.

According to this data, the number of uses of the word «delve» increased from less than 2000 times in 2022 to almost 18,000 times in 2024.

In turn, AI Phrase Finder, which used a dataset of 50,000 ChatGPT responses, found that the word «delve» was among the 10 most popular words used by ChatGPT.

Delve can be translated as «dig», «digging». Or as «pit», «hollow».

«It’s one of those words that people only use when they’re writing and want to sound smart,», Graham wrote.

But in the comments to the post, many users noted that this is a perfectly normal word for them. For them, — primarily as former colonies of the British Empire (Nigeria, India, etc.)