Delve

Generative AI has turned into the kind of arms race we normally associate with doping in sports. By which I mean: the companies involved make a legal product and a bunch of people try to figure out when another bunch of people have used them. Meanwhile, LLMs and chatbots keep “improving” – by which most people mean that the early obvious markers of non-human prose have diminished. As in doping, every time you develop an accurate test, the companies release a new model that evades the known tests. So you make a new test, and… Meanwhile, people trade secrets – in this case, “signs of AI”. One of the first casualties of the generative AI era was the innocent word “delve”, which in 2024 was outed as a signal (but also a sign of Nigerian business English). Wikipedia, which battles all sorts of slop, has put real thought into detection. But simpler lists abound: overuse of em-dashes, repetition, a certain “generic blandness”, lacking sources, rule-of-three patterns. Pause to think: isn’t…