alt Hacker NewsOne construction I'm surprised the paper doesn't mention (although, to be fair, I'm sure they had plenty of options to choose from... and you have to draw the line somewhere :P) is that LLMs love to use transitive verbs intransitively[0], in a way I almost never see in human writing. At best it makes sentences weirdly ambiguous, at worst it makes them borderline incomprehensible, and it's especially annoying in technical contexts where precise language should be non-negotiable. Like, yes, I can make an educated guess about what it's trying to say, but if your so-called documentation requires readers/users to make educated guesses then something has gone terribly wrong.
[0] An example would be something like:
"The user presses a button, and the form submits."
There are valid intransitive uses of "submit," but none that make sense in this context. In this case "submit" either requires an object (like "the form submits data"--plus maybe an indirect object, like "the form submits data to the server") or should be swapped for "the form is submitted" if you absolutely don't want to supply an object.
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Maybe a hot take, but I think that example is fine. Less verbose than “the form is submitted” and there’s no ambiguity, it’s the English analogue to `form.submit()`.
In your other comment, “Talking also costs.”, it’s clarified through context that talking costs tokens.
I think it’s a side-effect of the AI companies trying to reduce verbosity and redundancy, which were my personal main complaints with LLM writing. Though I believe LLMs are still verbose, and I suspect it’s because they don’t know what to remove, and these are cheap gains where the LLM removes verbosity that is obvious but expected because everyone does it.
I’ve noticed this pattern a lot too, it’s awful. No human would ever write like that.
I sort of agree but I think the issue is more subtle.
Languages change over time, and one of the well-documented "laws" of language change (using that term very fuzzily) is that people like to take irregular features of a language and generalize them to make them more regular. And there are many English verbs (particularly verbs expressing a change of state) which can be used transitively or intransitively, with equal validity:
> "I opened the door" -- "the door was opened" -- "the door opened"
> "the heat melted the ice" -- "the ice was melted" -- "the ice melted"
> "the impact cracked the glass" -- "the glass was cracked" -- "the glass cracked"
This generalization has been common, especially in jargon-y contexts, long before the rise of LLMs. A pedant might insist on saying "wait for the compiler to compile the code", and Merriam-Webster thinks "compile" can only be used transitively. But I think most developers would say "wait for the code to compile [i.e. be compiled]" is fine too. (see e.g. this XKCD comic from 2007: https://xkcd.com/303/)
In my view, this usage is completely fine as an occasional thing, especially when the social process of language change has normalized it over time for a particular verb. The issue is that LLMs drastically overuse it and pepper it everywhere. Just like "it's not X, it's Y", which is fine occasionally in human writing, but has become a dreadful cliche through overuse.