Powderhorn

I'll believe that from German researchers when LLMs start shoehorning four nouns together instead of just delving.

A team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany published a non-peer-reviewed preprint copy of research they say detects that words that ChatGPT uses preferentially have started to appear more frequently in human speech since the bot was unleashed on the world in 2022.

So-called "GPT words" include comprehend, boast, swift, meticulous, and the most popular, delve. After analyzing 360,445 YouTube academic talks and 771,591 podcast episodes, the team concluded words like delve, swift, meticulous, and inquiry were just a few examples of terms that began appearing in more podcasts and videos across various topics.

I'd like to nominate "authenticity" as the vapid word of the year.

As always, "here's how" can be excised from a hed without any negative side effects.

In mid-2022, when BYD executive Lian Yubo was asked to compare Chinese manufacturing with Tesla’s technology, he remarked that Elon Musk was an example that all Chinese carmakers could learn from.

“Tesla is a very successful company no matter what. BYD respects Tesla and we admire Tesla,” he said in an interview on Chinese state media.

Yet just three years later, Tesla’s technological lead over its Chinese rivals has narrowed dramatically. It is fighting to stay ahead in the world’s largest car market, its sales are falling in many other countries and its efforts to develop fully self-driving vehicles are running into regulatory roadblocks.

Having once scoffed at the idea that BYD could ever be a competitor to Tesla, Musk returned from a visit to China last year with a sombre assessment for his senior management. “He had seen the BYD factories, the cost and their tech,” says one former Tesla executive, adding that Musk believed China was winning the electric vehicle race.

As Tesla’s sales decline following Musk’s forays into US politics and amid a lack of new models, BYD has overtaken it to become the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs. Its annual revenues surpassed $100 billion for the first time in 2024.

On May 23, we got a very interesting email from Ghost, the service we use to make 404 Media. “Paid subscription started,” the email said, which is the subject line of all of the automated emails we get when someone subscribes to 404 Media. The interesting thing about this email was that the new subscriber had been referred to 404 Media directly from chatgpt.com, meaning the person clicked a link to 404 Media from within a ChatGPT window. It is the first and only time that ChatGPT has ever sent us a paid subscriber.

From what I can tell, ChatGPT.com has sent us 1,600 pageviews since we founded 404 Media nearly two years ago. To give you a sense of where this slots in, this is slightly fewer than the Czech news aggregator novinky.cz, the Hungarian news portal Telex.hu, the Polish news aggregator Wykop.pl, and barely more than the Russian news aggregator Dzen.ru, the paywall jumping website removepaywall.com, and a computer graphics job board called 80.lv. In that same time, Google has sent roughly 3 million visitors, or 187,400 percent more than ChatGPT.

This is really neither here nor there because we have tried to set our website up to block ChatGPT from scraping us, though it is clear this is not always working. But even for sites that don’t block ChatGPT, new research from the internet infrastructure company CloudFlare suggests that OpenAI is crawling 1,500 individual webpages for every one visitor that it is sending to a website. Google traffic has begun to dry up as both Google’s own AI snippets and AI-powered SEO spam have obliterated the business models of many media websites.

Every time "tech" comes up with a journalism "solution," journalists get laid off while the product gets worse. First it was SEO, then Facebook, then Twitter ... you'd think people trained to detect patterns can do better than just hopping on the latest hype that kills traffic.

The 21st century is turning out weirder than we thought. For the entire history of art, for example, tools could be used and abused and would work more or less well, but generally helped the wishes and skills of the user. They did not plot against us. Now they can – and do.

Take the painter's palette. A simple, essential, and harmless tool – just don't lick the chrome yellow, Vincent – affording complete control of the visual spectrum while being an entirely benign piece of wood. Put the same idea into software, and it becomes a thief, a deceiver, and a spy. Not a paranoid fever dream of an absinthe-soaked dauber, but the observed behavior of a Chrome extension color picker. Not a skanky chunk of code picked up from the back streets of cyberland, but a Verified by Google extension from Google's own store.

This seems to have happened because when the extension was first uploaded to the store, it was as simple, useful, and harmless as its physical antecedents. Somewhere in its life since then, an update slipped through with malicious code that delivered activity data to the privacy pirates. It's not alone in taking this path to evil.

One wonders what might be different if making a living wage didn't usually involve deceit of some form.

Warmer water at the seaside might sound appealing for your holiday dip, but a recent ocean heatwave in the Mediterranean Sea has been so intense scientists fear potentially devastating consequences for marine life.

The temperature of the sea surface regularly passed 30C off the coast of Majorca and elsewhere in late June and early July, in places six or seven degrees above usual.

That's probably warmer than your local leisure centre swimming pool.

It has been the western Med's most extreme marine heatwave ever recorded for the time of year, affecting large areas of the sea for weeks on end.

I can't abide an unnecessary question hed.

When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil. The contrast between the online world and my daily reality has only gotten more jarring.

Since my own work is focused on topics such as intergroup conflict, misinformation, technology and climate change, I’m aware of the many challenges facing humanity. Yet, it seems striking that people online seem to be just as furious about the finale of The White Lotus or the latest scandal involving a YouTuber. Everything is either the best thing ever or the absolute worst, no matter how trivial. Is that really what most of us are feeling? No, as it turns out. Our latest research suggests that what we’re seeing online is a warped image created by a very small group of highly active users.

After its release in late 2022, ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Since then the artificial intelligence (AI) tool has significantly affected how we learn, write, work and create. But new research shows that it’s also influencing us in ways we may not be aware of—such as changing how we speak.

Hiromu Yakura, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, first noticed differences in his own vocabulary about a year after ChatGPT came out. “I realized I was using ‘delve’ more,” he says. “I wanted to see if this was happening not only to me but to other people.” Researchers had previously found that use of large language models (LLMs), such as those that power ChatGPT, was changing vocabulary choices in written communication, and Yakura and his colleagues wanted to know whether spoken communication was being affected, too.

The team’s results, posted on the preprint server arXiv.org last week, show a surge in GPT words in the 18 months after ChatGPT’s release. The words didn’t just appear in formal, scripted videos or podcast episodes; they were peppered into spontaneous conversation, too.

I've noticed that the more I use any given LLM, the more tedious the rigid idiolect becomes. The use of vocabulary generally reserved in conversation for extraordinary events feels shoehorned into more mundane matters.

I usually provide a snippet here, but the detail supporting the thesis is worth the full read. And it's a long one for Techdirt. Here are the first few grafs, beyond which things go sufficiently far into the weeds to make tick spray a good idea:

There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary.

This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and freedom in the face of forces designed to eliminate all three.

We live in the most dangerous moment in human history—not because of nuclear weapons or climate change, though both threaten our survival, but because we are creating systems that threaten something deeper: our capacity to remain human. To make meaning. To experience genuine choice. To live lives worth living rather than optimized lives managed by algorithms and administered by bureaucrats.

And our response to this existential crisis? Magical thinking. The comfortable delusion that simple solutions exist for complex problems, that we can have technological progress without existential consequences, that we can avoid difficult choices by pretending they don’t exist.

This is not just political failure—it’s the systematic abandonment of what makes us human in the first place.

Human beings are meaning-making creatures. This isn’t a nice feature of consciousness—it’s what consciousness is for. We don’t just process information like biological computers; we create significance, purpose, and value through the active engagement of our minds with reality. We transform raw experience into narrative, chaos into order, suffering into wisdom.

Rare is the piece of this length that I fully agree with. But this provides a nice, comprehensive overview of just how fucked we are.

Parenthetical added on account of "holiday" stateside tending to be Christmas music, and Mariah Carey is nowhere to be found in the story.

Until 1982, if you wanted to go on holiday, you had to go to a high street travel agent, who would generally make a bunch of phone calls and tell you to come back later. Then Thomson Holidays introduced the first computerised booking system and pricing was deregulated – enter the golden age of Brits-on-tour package trips to Benidorm, Torremolinos and the other resorts scattered along the Costa del Sol.

It created a curious phenomenon of its own: the hit single the holidaymakers brought home. Plenty of 1980s European artists won a single hit, perhaps two, in the UK before slinking back into obscurity or – just as often – back into the domestic or continental stardom they already had before the British deigned to take an interest. For a few weeks, their names were inescapable: Spagna, Sabrina, Modern Talking, Desireless, Baltimora, Opus, Nena. Then they became pub quiz answers.

I was at HEB yesterday, and 99 Luftballoons was playing over the intercom. Not the absurd English version, but the original German.

Fitting, I suppose, if anyone actually knew what she was saying ... "und daß sowas von sowas kommt."

We're all aware of the microplastics problem. Here's the new hotness.

Marine plastic litter tends to grab headlines, with images of suffocating seabirds or bottles washing up along coastlines. Increasingly, researchers have been finding tiny microplastic fragments across all environments, from the most densely populated cities to pristine mountaintops, as well as in human tissue including the brain and placenta. A study published today reveals yet another hidden source of this deadly waste: nanometre-scale particles are literally everywhere, says co-author Dušan Materić, an environmental analytical chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.

Materić and his colleagues sampled water at three depths representative of different environments in the North Atlantic Ocean. Throughout the water column, they found three types of nanoplastic: polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polystyrene (PS) and polyvinylchloride (PVC). These were present at average concentrations of 18 milligrams per metre cubed, which translates to 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics spread across just the top layer of the temperate to subtropical North Atlantic. “Nanoplastics make up the dominant fraction of marine plastic pollution,” Materić says. In the entire world’s oceans, it is estimated that there are around 3 million tonnes of floating plastic pollution — excluding nanoplastics.

Good thing he doesn't go on You Can't do That on Television.

Donald Trump hasn’t been happy with Vladimir Putin lately, and he took out his frustrations with Russia’s president this week by announcing that the United States would resume sending military aid to Ukraine. When he was asked on Tuesday who ordered the aid to be paused in the first place, Trump delivered what has become one of his go-to responses whenever he’s pressed about the chaos his administration is unleashing on the nation and the world.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The pause on aid to Ukraine was apparently ordered last week by beleaguered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who reportedly neglected to tell the White House about the move, leading to internal scrambling. Trump was asked whether he approved the pause while sitting next to Hegseth during a Cabinet meeting. The president only offered that the U.S. needs to keep sending “defensive weapons” to Ukraine because “Putin is not treating human beings right.” When asked who ordered the pause, Trump said he didn’t know. “Why don’t you tell me?” he added.

This would be far more amusing if he got slimed every time he said that.

Also, what kind of strongman doesn't know what's going on in his loyal junta?

I think they misspelled "grift," but that's neither here nor there.

Last week, President Donald Trump signed what is likely the most regressive U.S. tax-and-spending bill in U.S. history, giving the top one percent of families more than $1 trillion in tax cuts while slashing Medicaid health coverage and food assistance for the poor. It is also one of the worst environmental bills in U.S. history.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” provides billions of dollars in giveaways to the fossil fuel industry and its wealthiest executives while taking a machete to our national effort to confront the climate crisis and build healthier, more sustainable, and more just communities.

“The Big Ugly Bill is a direct attack on our communities and our climate,” says Irene Burga of GreenLatinos. “This bill puts profit over people, and it will worsen the heat, pollution, and injustice we are already fighting to survive.”

The new law compounds the already $17 billion in direct federal subsidies U.S. taxpayers pay to oil, gas, and coal companies every year. It cuts hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives for renewable energy, despite it being cheaper, healthier, more efficient, and more reliable than fossil fuels. As a result, the law threatens nearly a million U.S. jobs and will result in higher electricity and transportation costs for people living in every state in the continental U.S.