Words also just rotate around in popularity like any other fad. Remember synergy? Paradigm shifts? Thinking outside the box?

Academia isn’t immune to memes, far from it. In the semi-contained world of higher education, trends in words and phrases are even more pronounced and likely to spread.

If this is evidence of LLM usage, it could easily be the machines reflecting back trends. These things pick up on subtle cues in your prompts to match tone with you as well so I wouldn’t rule out human influence either in prompts or the RLHF process.

Imagine being a director at this company. One of your employees brings you a report showing that your most active users, who are the backbone of your business, have a huge overlap with rape reports. This will destroy the company, and you know they’ll fire you for bringing it up and suppress it anyway. So you just… forget… to bring it up at the next quarterly. You used to work at Uber, and before that covering up how gambling and gaming companies float on a raft made of addicts, so this is well practiced blindness.