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ChatGPT's Favorite Phrases

· 6 min read
Ziang Xie
CEO, Sapling.ai
Falling stream of characters.

Introduction

Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November of 2022, hundreds of millions of users have used it to generate billions of tokens per day.

ChatGPT, like other large language models (LLMs), has a distinctive style, and in the initial months of its release would frequently use the phrase "as a large language model" as a precursor to its responses.

Since then, this tic appears to have been reduced, but led us to wonder: what other phrases are strongly associated with ChatGPT's style, but not with the writing of humans? Beyond these statistics, what does this tell us about its training?

Method

Our approach was to take question-answer (QA) data with responses by both humans and by ChatGPT. We then determine the phrases that frequently occur in ChatGPT responses but infrequently occur in human responses. While this can be done by manually inspecting outputs and making observations, we instead form all possible subsequences of words in the texts (up to length 5) and count the frequency of each.

Data

To perform an empirical analysis of ChatGPT's favorite phrases, we used the HC3 dataset. This dataset contains ~24K examples of human and AI-generated responses to prompts from Reddit, WikiQA, StackExchange, and other sources of question-answer pairs.

We note that this is just one snapshot of responses, and while we may expect the human styles and phrasings to hold steady (at least over the course of a few years), LLMs such as ChatGPT are evolving and changing by the week; the datasets described may need to be updated.

n-grams

After some simple preprocessing of the data, we computed the 5-grams in each split (human, AI) in the dataset. This resulted in 6,036,620 human n-grams and 3,631,482 ChatGPT n-grams: the first difference we observe is that human-generated text remains more diverse than AI-generated text.

We would expect certain n-grams to appear frequently in both splits (at the end of the, in whole or in part) but others to appear much more frequently in human-generated text and others to appear much more frequently in AI-generated text. More precisely perhaps, we would not expect LLMs to generate specific sequences of text due to the methods in which they've been trained and finetuned with human preferences.

Results

Based on the analysis above, here are the top 20 phrases most indicative of human-generated text:

PhraseLog Probability Delta
the end of the trading-2.3243
put a lot of strain-2.0574
what you want to achieve-2.0332
to give you a basic-2.0118
for the most part its-2.0069
a bit of a mystery-1.9875
i am not a medical-1.9823
is a matter of personal-1.9750
a few of the many-1.9646
i hope that helps let-1.9407
it is up to each-1.9109
the money in the account-1.9042
if you are a nonresident-1.8966
the ratio of the circumference-1.8936
to do this is by-1.8752
are some of the main-1.8651
to the united states constitution-1.8348
the tip of the [redacted]-1.8265
come up with a plan-1.7752
as a matter of law-1.7748
the best of my ability-1.7566
the length of the side-1.7447
the energy that is released-1.7409
the result of a combination-1.7016
there is also the risk-1.6976

Here are the top 20 phrases most likely to appear in ChatGPT-generated text and not in human-generated text:

PhraseLog Probability Delta
<s> there are a couple2.9191
its also important to think2.3774
is always a good thing2.1334
it is also important that2.0646
it is important to know2.0253
can vary depending on what2.0024
i hope this helps </s>1.9463
you may want to check1.9204
<s> another reason is because1.9133
i hope that helps </s>1.8907
best course of action is1.8803
it is generally considered impolite1.8401
it is important to study1.8371
to keep in mind is1.8360
i hope this helps you1.8343
a good idea to go1.8296
<s> there are a lot1.8218
by a variety of methods1.8128
<s> there are many theories1.8114
to keep in mind the1.8098
one way to think of1.8061
it can be difficult if1.7998
a good idea to put1.7873
be able to determine that1.7555
is important to remember however1.7528

Aside: <s> and </s> are special tokens indicating the start and end of a text. The number following each n-gram is the difference in log-probability between that text appearing in human vs. ChatGPT-generated text.

Observations

There are clear patterns in the phrases associated with ChatGPT:

  • Emphasizing important points (it is important..., is always a good thing, ...)
  • Expressing uncertainty (can vary depending, you may want to check, ...)
  • Presenting multiple options and viewpoints (its also important to..., it is important to remember..., ...) Many of these patterns are likely a result of the human examples and preferences that ChatGPT has been tuned on.

It's more difficult to immediately identify patterns in the human n-grams. Perhaps a slightly lower degree of formality (to give you a basic, for the most part its) and also topics such as medical and financial advice where LLMs can be more strict and formulaic given the gravity of the topic.

Conclusion

The phrases we've identified demonstrate patterns in ChatGPT's responses that are a reflection of the data that was used to train it. But how strong a signal are they of whether a text was AI-generated or not?

AI-generated content is proliferating, and it can be helpful to have surefire "signatures" (such as as a large language model) that a text was produced by an LLM. But this is only effective in cases where the user was sloppy and left these telltale signs in the generated text.

Many of tried to create watermarks that indicate whether an image is AI-generated. These properties can also be put in an image's metadata to indicate its provenance. However, the same is much harder to bake into easily editable text. Some researchers have proposed probabilistic watermarks based on partitioning vocabularies; however, these require the participation of all major LLM developers.

Interested in other, up-to-date approaches for flagging AI-generated text? Try Sapling's regularly updated AI detector and contact us if you're interested in using it for your business.