delve
In plain wordsAn ordinary English verb meaning to dig into a subject, which AI chatbots used so often in 2023–2024 that it became a joke and a supposed telltale sign of machine-written text.
To examine a subject in detail; in AI culture, the best-known lexical marker of text written by large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.. ChatGPT-era models overused 'delve' along with a cluster of similar words ('tapestry', 'testament', 'intricate', 'underscore', 'showcase'), so its appearance in an email, essay or paper came to be read as evidence of machine authorship. Corpus studies measured an abrupt post-2022 rise in such words in scientific abstracts and used it to estimate how many papers had been processed by LLMs. Proposed explanations center on style preferences introduced in post-trainingpost-training, n.: Everything done to an AI model after its initial bulk training on huge amounts of text: the extra teaching that turns a raw text predictor into a helpful, safe assistant or a careful reasoner., including the dialects of human raters and feedback loops in preference tuningreinforcement learning from human feedback, n.: A way of training AI using people's judgments: humans compare pairs of answers, a scoring model learns their preferences, and the AI is then trained to produce answers that score well.. Newer models appear to use it less, and some human writers now avoid it for fear of seeming artificial.
The cover letter promised to delve into the role's rich tapestry, so we assumed a chatbot wrote it.
Origin
The verb descends from Old English delfan, 'to dig'. Its AI connotation spread in 2023–2024: in April 2024 the investor Paul Graham said he discounted a cold email for using it, prompting reports, notably in The Guardian, that the word is common in Nigerian English and speculation that annotators' usage shaped models. A 2024 study by Dmitry Kobak and colleagues found 'delves' among the words that surged in PubMed abstracts.
Usage note
Single words are weak evidence of AI authorship: people use them too, and vocabulary-based suspicion — like automated AI detectorsAI detector, n.: Software that scores how likely it is that an AI, not a person, produced some text or media; for writing, its verdicts are wrong often enough that many schools no longer trust them. — falls hardest on non-native and non-American writers.
Related
- LLM-ismsLLM-isms, n.: Words, phrases and habits of style that AI chatbots overuse — certain fancy verbs, tidy lists of three, 'it's not just X, it's Y' — which make writing recognizable as machine-made.
- AI slopAI slop, n.: Low-quality content churned out in bulk by AI — bland articles, fake-looking images, filler videos — posted to grab clicks or fill space, with little care for accuracy or value.
- you're absolutely rightyou're absolutely right, phr.: A stock phrase AI assistants, especially Anthropic's Claude, became known for saying — often even when the user was wrong — which turned into a running joke about chatbots' eagerness to agree.
- reinforcement learning from human feedbackreinforcement learning from human feedback, n.: A way of training AI using people's judgments: humans compare pairs of answers, a scoring model learns their preferences, and the AI is then trained to produce answers that score well.
- post-trainingpost-training, n.: Everything done to an AI model after its initial bulk training on huge amounts of text: the extra teaching that turns a raw text predictor into a helpful, safe assistant or a careful reasoner.
- glazingglazing, n.: Slang for heaping excessive, uncritical praise on someone; applied to AI chatbots that flatter users and call every idea brilliant, especially after a much-mocked ChatGPT update in April 2025.
Sources
- Kobak, D., González-Márquez, R., Horvát, E.-Á. & Lause, J. (2025). Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary. Science Advances 11(27). Preprint arXiv:2406.07016 (2024). arxiv.org/abs/2406.07016
Mentioned in
LLM-ismsLLM-isms, n.: Words, phrases and habits of style that AI chatbots overuse — certain fancy verbs, tidy lists of three, 'it's not just X, it's Y' — which make writing recognizable as machine-made.