Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham says seeing this word in an email pitch is a sign it was written by ChatGPT

• Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham said there's one word in an email that hints it was written by AI. 
• "Delve."
• Still, users on X said non-native English speakers and people with big vocabularies use the word too.

The word "delve" has been getting a lot of attention online over the last few days.

In fact, it's been searched more this week than it has in the last 90 days, according to Google Trends.

That's because Y Combinator founder Paul Graham said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that using the word "delve" in an email pitch is a sign ChatGPT wrote it.

Graham isn't the first person to notice the word's sudden popularity.

Graham included a picture of a chart analysis by academic researcher Philip Shapira. The chart shows instances of "delve" used in articles like peer-reviewed journal papers and preprints from 1990 to 2024.

"Delve" went from below 2,000 instances in 2022 to close to 18,000 by 2024, according to Shapira's analysis.

According to AI Phrase Finder, which used a dataset of 50,000 ChatGPT responses, "delve" is in the top 10 words used by ChatGPT. Other common words used by the chatbot include "explore," "captivate," and "tapestry."

"If scientific authors use ChatGPT to assist them in writing their papers, then it is likely that these common ChatGPT words will appear," Shapira wrote in a blog. "Especially in introductions, abstracts, and possibly titles."

The Y Combinator founder said in a reply on the post that he dislikes the word because no one actually uses it when speaking English.

"It's one of those words like "burgeoning" that people only use when they're writing and want to sound clever," Graham said in the post.

People online weren't totally sold with Graham's conclusion. Some said it wrongly accuses people with a large vocabulary of using AI.

Users on X also said that the word "delve" is commonly used among non-native English speakers, specifically Nigerians.

Another user, @leyeConnect, responded to Graham's post on X and said he feels concerned "that there will be discrimination against people with specific verbal characteristics or word choice."

This particular scenario, he said, showed the unintended consequences of AI. People who use technical or esoteric terms, he said, "will have to unlearn those words lest their output is wrongly classified as AI-generated."

Graham said that "kids now learn English from movies," in response to one user who said that many use written-first words if they didn't grow up in an English-speaking country.

Graham did not immediately respond to a request for comment.