{"id":242493,"date":"2026-01-13T16:18:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T16:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/242493\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T16:18:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T16:18:11","slug":"why-does-the-word-delve-make-me-want-to-hurl-my-phone-at-the-wall-chatgpt-thats-why-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/242493\/","title":{"rendered":"Why does the word \u2018delve\u2019 make me want to hurl my phone at the wall? ChatGPT, that\u2019s why \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A report out in December<\/a> expressed concerns that Ireland is \u201clagging the rest of the world\u201d when it comes to the use of AI<\/a> at work. Daily use of generative AI stands at about 10 per cent in Ireland, compared to 14 per cent globally. The authors worry that those who are not early adopters will get left behind.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think there\u2019s much reason to panic. I suspect the real problem is not that we are using AI too little, but that we are using it badly. There are plenty of worthwhile tasks it can take care of \u2013 cancer detection, recipe ideas or holiday planning. If only that was how people were mostly using it.<\/p>\n

A hearing at the Workplace Relations Commission<\/a> this week offered an example of a less than optimal use case. A human resources worker taking a case against her employer made an impressive 16 submissions, many referencing past rulings. Lawyers for her former employer were unable to find evidence of some of these rulings in real life, and wondered if they had perhaps been \u201challucinated\u201d by AI. The adjudicator asked if she had been getting \u201cAI assistance\u201d with her filing.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course. I\u2019m just one person,\u201d the complainant replied.<\/p>\n

Hallucinations happen because AI is unable to admit when it doesn\u2019t know something. They are the most egregious manifestation of its pathological people-pleasing, but not the only one. Almost as bad is the distinctive, irritating voice ChatGPT<\/a> adopts in its writing. It is a tone that is anxious to please, overconfident and simultaneously completely uninvested in the subject matter. Whether it is describing a traumatic life experience or a shocking human rights abuse, it will do so with the emotional register of a McDonald\u2019s server offering you a meal deal. That tone can be reassuring if you\u2019re trying to identify whether the weird rash on your neck is ringworm or skin cancer, but it\u2019s not appropriate to every situation.<\/p>\n

A friend recently introduced me to an Instagram account by a user who has a running gag in which he tries to get AI to change the register. \u201cHelp, I\u2019m tied to these train tracks,\u201d the user (@husk.irl) will tell an AI chatbot over video. \u201cWhat should I do?\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cOh, I see what you\u2019re doing,\u201d the AI replies in one such video, \u201cyou\u2019re just kind of lying down on some old tracks. I\u2019m pretty sure you\u2019re just joking around, but just to be on the safe side, it looks like these tracks are pretty old and not in use.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThe train\u2019s coming,\u201d @husk.irl says. \u201cWell, it looks like you\u2019re totally safe,\u201d the AI replies cheerfully. \u201cLet me know if you need help with anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Worse than its terminal state of detachment, though, is what it has done to perfectly benign and serviceable words like \u201cdelve\u201d, \u201cunpack\u201d, \u201ccrucial\u201d, \u201cdiscourse\u201d, and \u201clandscape\u201d. As Sam Kriss put it<\/a> in a brilliant essay in the New York Times recently: \u201cEntirely ordinary words, like \u2018tapestry,\u2019 which has been innocently describing a kind of vertical carpet for more than 500 years, make me suddenly tense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plenty of people suffer from a form of that phenomenon Kriss identifies \u2013 the sudden state of alertness when you come across, say, an em dash, random italics for emphasis or a three-adjective phrase (AI loves things that come in threes). I used to find doomscrolling on Instagram relaxing. Now it\u2019s fraught with too many opportunities for untrammelled fury. \u201cIt\u2019s not just a scent, it\u2019s a fragrance crafted to defy convention,\u201d a caption under a perfume ad will say, and instead of reaching for my wallet, I want to slam my phone against a hard surface. <\/p>\n

I decided to ask an expert to help define what it is that is so irritating about ChatGPT\u2019s tone. ChatGPT itself suggested that it may be guilty of overreliance on the \u201cresponsible adult\u201d voice and the inconclusive \u201cno-one-gets-hurt ending\u201d. <\/p>\n

Of course, the \u2018no-one-gets-hurt ending\u2019 is a hallucination in itself. We may have had no choice<\/a> about handing over every word ever printed to AI models, but many of us are now compounding the injury by wilfully outsourcing to it our ability to write, to think, to figure out what we want to say<\/a>. <\/p>\n

AI optimists insist that eventually we\u2019ll no longer be able to spot the difference between human and AI voices, and by then we won\u2019t care. It seems more likely that we\u2019ll all settle into some form of miserable state of hypervigilance. As Kriss writes, \u201cit\u2019s becoming an increasingly wretched life. You can experience it too\u201d. <\/p>\n

When you become sufficiently obsessed, you start to see the hand of AI everywhere. You might pick up Samantha Harvey\u2019s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital<\/a>, for which she painstakingly conducted real-life interviews with astronauts. You are as sure as you can be that it was written without any assistance from AI. And yet you feel that tense prickling on the back of your neck when you read a sentence like: \u201cThere\u2019s something so crisp and clear and purposeful about the earth by night, its thick embroidered urban tapestries.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0AI blunders in 2025: From false news alerts to non-existent court casesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

And that is the nub of the issue. Harvey did not use ChatGPT, but it is, unfortunately very likely the case that ChatGPT used Harvey.<\/p>\n

When I feel too depressed about all of this, I rewatch a video I came across on social media in which a user opens ChatGPT on two devices and invites them to have a conversation. \u201cI\u2019m totally up for some spontaneity,\u201d one ChatGPT says to the other. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m ready for some spontaneity whenever you are,\u201d the other replies. \u201cSounds like a plan,\u201d the first goes. <\/p>\n

And on and on they continue in a relentless death spiral of lighthearted fun and spontaneity that keeps promising to get off the ground any second, and never quite does \u2013 which feels like as apt a metaphor as any for our relationship with AI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A report out in December expressed concerns that Ireland is \u201clagging the rest of the world\u201d when it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,2670,61,60,35233,80],"class_list":["post-242493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jennifer-o-connell","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}