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WRITING
How ChatGPT is Dumbing Down Our Writing
And what we can do about it
In an age of…
Let’s delve into…
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A vibrant tapestry…
These four phrases might be enough to get this article flagged as potentially written by artificial intelligence.
We all recognise such phrases. We’ve learned to recoil from them. They’ve become an instant turn-off, signalling that we are not reading something written by a genuine human, but a poor-quality approximation by a machine.
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles recently about how to avoid having your writing mistaken for something written by AI. Most of them mention the use of phrases like the ones above as being ‘dead giveaways’.
It’s true to an extent, but it’s also funny because these phrases, and other ‘dead giveaway’ phrases like them, are real phrases used by real people. I recently read an article about this subject, where the writer claimed, “I don’t know anybody who speaks like this in real life.”
Really? Where do you think ChatGPT picked it up from? Large language models like ChatGPT and others were trained on real writing by real people.
