ChatGPTs favorite words & punctuationPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min read2 days ago-- 20 more days until 2025Issue #226: Nikki Giovanni. Sora. Luigi.Following up on last weeks issue re: two years of ChatGPT, Ive been thinking about something. How do you know, on a word or sentence level, when someones used it? What are the tells? What separates this is kinda formulaic writing from this is definitely AI?As you may remember from a previous newsletter, GPT loves to delve. Its preference for overly formal, vaguely British language is a well-documented result of being trained by workers in Nigeria, where delve is used in a business context far more than in the U.S. or anywhere else. A few more tells, via Jordan Gibbs who analyzed 1 million words from the machine and published his results on Medium:TirelesslyCannotReimaginedIntertwineIntricateTapestryExpanseKaleidoscopicA more recent analysis corroborates these findings, and adds a few more words. Pivotal. Vital. Comprehensive. ChatGPT also imitates certain syntax patterns common among smart-sounding writing, like em dashes and colons in titles.Theres a deeper pattern Ive noticed, though: ChatGPT cant write well in first-person. By well I dont just mean clearly. I mean the type of first-person writing where you feel like theres a real human behind the words. (This is a great example of writing that felt 100% human to me.) One way humans do that show other people were human, not automatons is by telling jokes, but ChatGPT kind of fails at being funny. I mean, its fine at dad jokes (one-liners, puns, predictable humor) but its terrible at a type of humor that is uniquely human: subtext. Humor that says more than what words alone convey. An example: Sarah Coopers 10 tricks to appear smart in meetings, which communicates nuanced subtext about corporate conformity.Journalist Will Lockett writes: As ChatGPT doesnt actually know what it is writing, it cant have the self-aware, helicopter view of writing needed to create great subtext. ChatGPT might be able to riff on a theme, but it doesnt have the societal and self-awareness to come up with those themes in the first place. Harris Sockel Also today: Nikki Giovanni. Sora. Luigi.Nikki Giovanni poet, teacher, activist, and Grammy nominee passed away on Monday. She was 81. At the peak of her career, in the 60s and 70s, Giovanni openly admitted that most people dont read poetry, so she recorded her 1971 debut album, Truth Is on Its Way, with a Gospel choir. At the time, writes Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal, I didnt fully understand the genius of Giovannis vision she was blatantly trying to bring the profane in conversation with the sacred, two decades before Kirk Franklin and later Kanye West would bring ghetto theodicy to the top of the pop charts.OpenAI launched a new tool, Sora, that allows you to input a few sentences and generate a video. We can all be filmmakers now, even without a camera. (Maybe well feed a few of these newsletters to Sora so you can watch them?)Luigi Mangione suspected UnitedHealth CEO assassin emailed a friend earlier this year to rail against the lack of civil disobedience in Japan, which seems foreboding (to me). Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on creativityA gem from one of my favorite books (which I really need to read again), Oliver Burkemans Four Thousand Weeks: When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, thats when youre free to plunge energetically into them.