To Delve Or Not To Delve: Y Combinator's Paul Graham Kicks Up A Storm After Receiving A Pitch Allegedly Written Using ChatGPT

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has kicked up a storm on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, by alleging that a pitch he received via email was possibly written using OpenAI's ChatGPT.

What Happened: Graham took to X to post a theory he had about a pitch email. He thinks that the pitch was written using ChatGPT and not by the sender.

But how did Graham even arrive at that conclusion? His theory is based on the use of the word "delve."

That kicked the hornet's nest and Graham was slammed by X users. Reactions ranged from people digging up the colonial past to its wider usage in countries like Nigeria.

However, Graham reiterated that there's an analysis that points to signs that the sudden rise in the use of "delve" coincided with ChatGPT's surge in popularity.

The analysis notes that ChatGPT tends to overuse words like "delve," and Graham spotted this in the pitch he received.

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But why is this bad? Graham says that it's not a commonly used word.

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"No one uses it in spoken English. It’s one of those words like ‘burgeoning' that people only use when they’re writing and want to sound clever."

Why It Matters: The arrival of ChatGPT and other AI tools has led to an increasing number of incidents where researchers and authors of papers use the output generated by these AI chatbots without caring enough to edit out instances of overused words like "delve," "captivate," "tapestry," to name a few.

In some cases, researchers have seemingly pasted ChatGPT-generated text, including the "Regenerate response" button's text, without caring enough to see what they are doing.

Graham, on his part, says "It feels like being sent object code instead of source code," which makes the pitch feel less authentic.

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