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Is this one word the shortcut to detecting AI-written work?

Use of the word has taken off in medical research papers, but if that is evidence of AI writing we should still worry more about boring work than the risk of studies being fabricated.

Nick Bonyhady
Nick BonyhadyTechnology writer

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In 2023, medical researchers developed a new obsession: they started using the word “delve” at four times the rate they had in 2022. PubMed, a biomedical research database, showed it appeared in papers more than 2500 times that year, which was the first that ChatGPT was widely in use.

“We all know ChatGPT overuses the word ‘delve’,” says Swinburne University AI writing researcher Dr Jeremy Nguyen, who first noticed the jump and put out his findings recently. “Don’t mind me, just doing some delving today,” posted the official ChatGPT Twitter account on Thursday, in a winking reference that stopped short of confirmation it favoured the term.

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Nick Bonyhady is a technology writer for the Australian Financial Review, based in Sydney. He is a former technology editor, industrial relations and politics reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald and Age. Connect with Nick on Twitter. Email Nick at nick.bonyhady@afr.com

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    Original URL: https://www.afr.com/technology/is-this-one-word-the-shortcut-to-detecting-ai-written-work-20240417-p5fko6