In this comprehensive article, we will comprehensively explore the word ‘comprehensive’ to help you comprehend why this word is so heavily favored by AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
Obviously the above intro was written in jest, but you get the point. ChatGPT is absolutely besotted with ‘comprehensive’ and its corresponding adverb ‘comprehensively’ and we are on a mission to find out why.
Spoiler alert: it boils down to patterns and correlations in the vast amounts of text ChatGPT was trained on, which has influenced the way the chatbot writes introductions.
ChatGPT was trained to write academically
If your research, examination or analysis isn’t comprehensive in scope, it’s not going to gain any credibility in the academic world, that’s for sure.
Indeed, the degree of thoroughness matters a lot in academic writing, to the point where you wouldn’t dare publish a study or research paper without including the word ‘comprehensive’ in the title.
Now consider that ChatGPT developed its artificial neural network from academic text, as text of this kind is rigorous, structured and inextricably linked to data, making it perfect for bringing depth to the chatbot’s language understanding.
But you don’t cut your teeth in academic prose without picking up some habits along the way. In ChatGPT’s case, it learns by finding habits that correlate with positive outcomes.
In other words, the chatbot has worked out that putting ‘comprehensive’ in the title and stating in the introduction that you will cover the topic ‘comprehensively’ will earn you high praise in academic circles and lead to citations and references and other signals that validate the work.
A common ChatGPT introductory word
Thanks to academic literature, ChatGPT is obsessed with “in-depth discussions”, “extensive investigations”, “comprehensive overviews” etc., so much so that it uses these types of phrases even when generating non-academic text.
For example, if you ask ChatGPT to write a guide on how to plant a tree, it will often write an essay-like introduction by outlining the intentions of the guide: “In this guide, we will comprehensively explore the world of tree planting”.
If not “explore” then you can bet your bottom dollar on “delving into” the world of planting trees—delve is also a common introductory word in academic writing, hence why it has become a common ChatGPT word too.
While it is perfectly acceptable in academic writing, this robotic and somewhat lifeless wording and phrasing doesn’t lend itself well to informal texts like articles and guides and so forth.
But this chatbot doesn’t know any better. Unless the user specifies otherwise, it will stick with a formal writing tone and employ words like comprehensive/comprehensively to give its text an air of authority, just as they do in academia.
The elephant in the room
ChatGPT talks a good game with its promise of a comprehensive exploration of a given topic, but it never quite delivers.
Research shows that OpenAI limits the word count in each response to around 500 words, and though the developers haven’t acknowledged this, some experts believe it’s designed to stop computing costs from spiralling out of control.
The phenomenon of common ChatGPT words coupled with the low word count is what prompted me to pay for ChatGPT 4, but the results were disappointing in both of these areas to say the least.
Whether it is an inherent limitation within ChatGPT’s artificial neural network or a built-in cap doesn’t really matter. The point still stands that this chatbot says one thing and does another.
It’s the exact same story when crafting titles for its guides: ChatGPT will use the phrase “ultimate guide” when the proceeding content is scant at best! We already talked about the reasons why ultimate guide is a commonly used ChatGPT title.
There are few things Google hates more than content which misleads visitors. So, if you run a website that publishes AI-generated text, don’t allow ChatGPT to describe the content as being comprehensive in scope unless it actually is.
Summary
Comprehensive and comprehensively are words that ChatGPT uses a lot because the chatbot thinks it will make its writing more credible and appeal to as wide an audience as possible.
Words of this nature are commonplace is academic writing, which is a form of written communication that ChatGPT has specialized in.
But just because ChatGPT labels its work ‘comprehensive’ doesn’t make it so. In fact, there’s usually an undeniable gulf between what the chatbot says in the introduction and what it actually delivers in the main body of its text output.
Within the confines of ChatGPT, it doesn’t really matter if the word count fails to meet the definition of comprehensive, but there is definitely some real-world consequences in the realm of SEO if you publish a piece of content with this contradiction.