A.I: The Robinhood of Words

I asked “Delve” how it felt after gaining status as a commonly used or overused word thanks to the arrival of AI language models. Delve gave me a broad smile and explained that it felt good to be in the spotlight. It was happy to be used by millions of people around the world.

According to AI police, one of AI’s favourite words is “Delve”. Calculations by Researcher Jeremy Nguyen, show that “Delve” appears in more than 0.5% of medical studies, whereas before ChatGPT, it was less than 0.04 %.

Anything wrong with “Delve” becoming everybody’s favourite? The same thing is happening to lots of other words like “Meticulous”, “Intricate” and “Tapestry”.

A librarian, Andrew Gray, from University College London analyzed five million scientific studies published last year and detected a sudden rise in the use of certain words, such as meticulously (up 137%), intricate (117%), commendable (83%) and meticulous (59%)

Why are we stuck on fishing out words that have become more common in written text thanks to AI.

Are these words being paid to be exclusive or used with privilege? Of what benefit is it to them (I’m speaking on behalf of the words)? Will writing really become monotonous or boring if some words make it to the limelight and become everyone’s favourite?

In the English Language, we’ve been using 26 letters of the alphabet for years. No one is complaining about using the same pronouns or articles. That’s different you would argue, there can only be one type of pronoun, colour, etc. Yea, I get that, but still, when you think about it, we read “he, she, them, they,” in every book and we’re fine with it.

What I believe AI is doing is bringing more words, which only a small fraction of the world’s population use, whether by dint of their profession or status, to a general audience. It enables those with an otherwise small vocabulary bank, cash out big time. Kind of like a Robinhood of words? (Does that even make sense?)

So what if you’re tired of watching “Delve” and its cronies on your screens, change the thesaurus channel and watch something else. But in time, even your new favourite will be picked up by AI and made into a superstar.

Then, it is time to sprinkle your fairy dust as a human and add the final touch to make your writing stand out.

Maybe, just maybe, we’re overthinking this AI thing too much. Allow yourself enjoy the read and don’t bother if we’ve “delved into it meticulously”.