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Ask HN: Why does ChatGPT love the word "eager" so much?
I have used English as a second language for many years, but I have never heard of this word.
Suddenly, while talking with ChatGPT, it appears almost in every other conversation...
Is it because I talk (sometimes) about PHP/Laravel/Eloquent, and it somehow fixed the "Eager loading of relationships," or is the language changed, and I did not notice?
Did you notice other words like this?
I found this article about the word "delve":
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape-ai-gadgest-humane-ai-pin-chatgpt https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...
Little off-topic: Lastly, I learned that children in Portugal have started to speak the Brazilian variant of Portuguese, as videos from there are flooding the Internet. It is interesting how technology affects our lives in more surprising areas.
- solardev 2y agoCan it just be a frequency illusion, where you tend to notice a new-to-you phenomenon again and again at first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion?wprov=sfla1 ? Eager isn't an especially uncommon word (eg "eager beavers" is a somewhat common saying), even though it's not used in most convos. I feel like "delve" is a YouTube phenomenon (as in "let's delve into this topic") as a weird proxy for "deep dive". Maybe a side effect of D&D's resurgence over the last decade, where it's often used to describe small adventures/dungeons...?
- JohnFen 2y ago> Eager isn't an especially uncommon word I'd say it's very common, at least in my part of the US. It's one of the words I hear on a daily basis, anyway. "Delve" used to be a very commonly used term before "deep dive" largely replaced it. I'm sure there are a whole lot of writings online that use "delve" because of the time period they were produced in. As a graybeard, I'm personally still much more likely to say "delve" than "deep dive".
- inanutshellus 2y agoI think niche words like "delve" get replaced by phrases like "deep dive" to accommodate ESLs, especially in big business and software development. "Delve" is the word to use, of course, but if you're going to lose (or annoy/insult) your ESL audience by using fancy words, maybe just being accommodating has value.
- jolt42 2y agoSeems like "chef's kiss" is replacing "icing on the cake" or "cherry on top", although I think it really means "stamp of approval", so that one has been bugging me since I hear it all the time now, it seems.
- vundercind 2y agoAll of that’s way more common in (American) business English than other registers, I’d say, including “eager”.
- 1attice 2y agoAs a former academic in tech I'm tickled that you think 'a deep dive' is normative while 'to delve' strikes your ear as strange. No judgment! I'm delighted, however, that language is so supple ("leverages domain-local synergies")
- SoftTalker 2y agoThis, and ChatGPT was trained on a lot of web content produced by businesses, so in my view this may lead it to overuse "buzzword" words such as "delve," "deep dive," "leverage," "optimize," "synergy," "impact," and others.
- supercoffee 2y agoMy new frequency illusion is the phrase "ride or die". I'm 32 and I had never heard that in my life until I watched that show Cruel Summer and now it seems like I hear it everywhere, mostly on tv/ads/podcasts and almost never when talking to people I know. I refuse to say it because I don't fully understand what it means and when I do hear it, it always sounds a little cringey.
- gregw134 2y agoA Will Smith movie called ride or die came out in May and grossed $400M. Probably explains the jump in that phrase. I had heard it before but you only hear that phrase every couple years or so.
- tommy_axle 2y ago"Paramount" has been that word for me. Last year it seemed like every response from ChatGPT included it.
- mjon6 2y agoSo I just heard about Frequency Illusion earlier today, and now I see it here again. Such meta. (Not kidding, from today’s NYT crossword column: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/crosswords/daily-puzzle-2024-08-12.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/crosswords/daily-puzzle-2...)
- agubelu 2y agoAnother giveaway of GPT content for me are overusing importance adjectives like "crucial" or "essential", and of course an extreme overuse of enumerations.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- soco 2y agoAn extreme overuse of everything. Like "give me a formula to color every second Excel row blue". "Sure! First make sure you have installed Excel, here are the steps..."
- WesolyKubeczek 2y agoI often find that it's easy for me to explain things in enumeration. I'm wondering if a) there is a latent middle manager living inside me, always shuffling his little powerpoint decks, or b) there is a little LM living inside me, making me compulsively enumerate things.
- wietze 2y agoAlthough "eager" isn't called out, a recent study of academic publications shows that the use of LLMs can be measured through word frequency analysis [1], finding certain words are disproportionally represented: > We study vocabulary changes in 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010–2024, and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. 1: https://arxiv.org/html/2406.07016v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2406.07016v1
- kgeist 2y agoI wonder why some words are overrepresented. Isn't the whole idea of language models to model word distribution as close as possible? Does it have something to do with RLHF? Or it's the training data?
- ben_w 2y agoLanguage models would be fairly useless for most people if they accurately modelled the source distribution, no better than autocomplete. In fact, they were fairly useless when they modelled the source distribution, that's why ChatGPT was an instant hit whereas GPT-3 was mainly only interesting to other AI reasearchers. What made LLMs suddenly interesting was that the responses were much more like answers and much less like additional questions in the same vein as the prompt.
- kgeist 2y ago>In fact, they were fairly useless when they modelled the source distribution, that's why ChatGPT was an instant hit whereas GPT-3 was mainly only interesting to other AI reasearchers. I had a bot which used the original GPT3 (i.e. the completion model, not the chat model) and its answers were pretty decent (with the right prompting). Often even better than GPT3.5, whose answers were overly formulaic in comparison ("as an AI language model...", "it's important to ..." all the time)
- ben_w 2y agoI think that means you would count as "another AI developer" ^_^;
- sdwr 2y agoChatGPT itself is eager, or plays the role of an eager companion. Why? - it's conversationally-aligned with dumping large amounts of information - it's an easy emotional state to hold unilaterally (without factoring in the other participant) - it's unlikely to offend or cause a PR nightmare - it's flattering!
- InsomniacL 2y agoI feel like ChatGPT is specifically 'eager' to help me, that may be an instruction to the LLM that overflows somewhat in to it's answers. But generally, 'eager' isn't particularly rare in English.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- guluarte 2y agoand thrilled
- shubb 2y agoEager loading is a technical term with a specific meaning, contrasting with lazy loading. Be the text came out of an llm the real question for the user is, does this technical term actually to this situation. If it does, then it's an appropriate word choice carrying additional information.
- FabHK 2y agoIt is generally the antonym, in technical contexts, to "lazy", as in "lazy evaluation" etc.
- dv35z 2y agoThe one that keeps popping up for me is "fosters"...
- bradyriddle 2y ago"Tapestry" is another frequently used word I've noticed.
- neilwilson 2y agoIt’s word use fashion, which LLM has influenced. Not uncommon pre-gpt either. Hence we suddenly started using two words “reaching out” rather than one “contact”.
- swyx 2y agoi compiled a list of overused words you can stick in a "please do not use these words unless you absolutely have to" antiprompt https://gist.github.com/swyxio/8ac555e88ad153764051012d2db27ea7 https://gist.github.com/swyxio/8ac555e88ad153764051012d2db27... (we use these in ainews summaries so that we dont delve too much https://buttondown.email/ainews https://buttondown.email/ainews)
- lxe 2y agoAlso see: tapestry, testament, delve
- allanren 2y agoI don't see that words often. Maybe it depends on the why question is asked.
- JohnMakin 2y agoOne of the funniest things I've ever heard/read about chatGPT "writing" is that it writes like a highschool student trying to inflate their word count on an essay. It typically uses a lot of words to say very little, and the style is hard to un-see once you recognize it.
- siva7 2y agoIt's called thinking out loud. Gets you better results. Try it out yourself.
- JohnMakin 2y agoChatGPT doesn’t think
- knodi123 2y agoProve to my satisfaction that you think. ;-)
- JohnMakin 2y agoI think that comments like this with emoticons are vague in intention and difficult to reply to especially given parent context - but basically, I think because I am thinking. No proof exists within the LLM flavor of AI products that they do any form of thinking as we understand it, because we haven’t even defined what thinking is. Charlatans tend to use vague definitions to advance whatever agenda they have, and when a subject is already poorly understood, it is prone to wild, unsubstantiated (and prone to misinterpretation) claims. Whatever you want to make of AI’s emergent abilities or whatever dumb AI meaningless buzzwords are the trend right now, you have to first prove to me you know how I think before I will accept your claim AI knows how to and as far as I’m aware that’s still an open question. Hope that explains my viewpoint.
- JohnMakin 2y agohttps://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Therefore_I_Am:_The_Tale_of_IG-88 https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Therefore_I_Am:_The_Tale_of... Only old heads will know this but this is a Star wars old canon short story from a collection of short stories that explores the topic of what consciousness and thoughts mean and in the context of a malevolent AI. “I think, therefore I am.” However, “think” is a bit ouroboric in definition and the reason this is an interesting question.
- system2 2y agoThe word ChatGPT uses the most is "apologize". Whenever I ask it to clean up a code and it either screws up the syntax or removes some necessary parts then starts apologizing until it is fixed or I give up. I specifically ask ChatGPT to stop apologizing because it becomes insufferable after a while. For texts, it uses "furthermore" more than any other word followed by "lastly" imho.
- souvlakee 2y agoWhat about "certainly" and "seasoned developer"?
- mattigames 2y agoSorry, this is a British company, we only hire unseasoned developerd here.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y ago> Lastly, I learned that children in Portugal have started to speak the Brazilian variant of Portuguese, as videos from there are flooding the Internet. It is interesting how technology affects our lives in more surprising areas. As a non-native speaker of English, I speak and write some weird mix of British and US English, and I always keep forgetting how strong the words "bugger" and "cunt" are in each context. Here's globalization for you.
- JSDevOps 2y agoAnd So