If you ask ChatGPT a question that has anything to do with the present, there’s a high probablity it will kick things off with the phrase “In this digital world…” or a variation of it.
We looked into the matter and uncovered a number of insights into how this chatbot works, which helps to explain the phenomenon of this very common ChatGPT phrase.
Find out how real-world usage of phrases like “digital world” and “digital age” has led to it becoming firmly embedded in the chatbot’s artificial neural network, and why it is important to remove it from AI-generated content.
We really do live in a digital world
Look around you. There’s no disputing the fact that digital technology is everywhere and it isn’t getting any less pervasive any time soon.
Lots of people wrote about the digital revolution as it went into full swing, and lots more continue to analyze society through this lens. The scope of literature on this topic is so extensive that ‘digital’ is the de facto term for the most recent chapter in human history.
Given that ChatGPT learns English through pattern recognition in human-written texts, it wouldn’t have taken very long for the chatbot to notice that digital technology is a recurring theme.
It’s a highly adaptable term
Not only has ChatGPT recognized the popularity of the term “digital world”, it also recognizes how versatile it is, which is music to the chatbot’s ears when it comes to stringing together sentences quickly and efficiently.
There are digital goods like cameras, clocks and watches. There’s digital communication and broadcasting, digital media, digital marketing—the list goes on and on.
As is the case with words like tapestry and robust, ChatGPT doesn’t have to use much processing power to generate text when it has highly versatile placeholders like “digital era” to lean on.
It targets a larger audience
You could present ChatGPT with an ultra-niche topic and it will still try to convince you that it has relevance to every living soul on the planet.
It’s hard to say why ChatGPT uses the largest possible domain whenever it introduces a topic, but one can take an educated guess that it’s done to make its text applicable to the largest possible audience.
The chatbot knows it can’t get away with something bland like “In this world” so it reaches for “In this digital world” instead, even though it basically means the same thing.
Why you should remove this common ChatGPT phrase
If you are copy-pasting ChatGPT-written content, be sure to make some final touches before publishing it online, otherwise your reputation and search rankings may suffer.
Recently the web has been inundated with AI content, leaving search engines with no choice but to raise their quality standards for rankable content.
Google in particular has given more weight to original texts and so your writing will likely be viewed as unoriginal if it contains common ChatGPT phrases like “In this digital world”.
Summary
The frequency of phrases like “In this digital world” can be put down to the fact that we have a long history of referring to the current era using the ‘digital’ label, and ChatGPT has cottoned on to this.
You also have to remember that the chatbot has a tendency to be overdramatic and insists on relating everything to the whole world, even if the topic at hand is only relevant to a small minority.