This isn’t entirely surprising but it’s a sad state of affairs, and it’s worth highlighting not just how, but also where LLMs are being trained:

Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire.

I know it’s too dismissive to call chatbots “fancy autocomplete” like many do, but we have to remember that this isn’t magic. The words the bots use come from somewhere. And in the case of “delve”…

I said “delve” was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where “delve” is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, “delve” is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African.