The Standard City Desk scribes have detected a strange phenomenon in recent weeks: a surge in emails from PRs containing the word ‘delve’.
This curious trend doesn’t seem confined to us. The word is popping up everywhere. As one academic observed, for example, the proportion of articles using ‘delve’ on research site PubMed is up 10 to 100 times this year on a couple of years ago.
What’s behind this? One working theory is that ChatGPT has a tendency to use this word when it doesn’t know what to say. The Guardian’s Alex Hearn posits that this is because the chatbot was trained using outsourced labour in parts of Africa where ‘delve’ is more common.
How bad has its adoption got in the PR world? Spy delved into the data.
In one City reporter’s inbox, the word was used in more than 150 emails received over the past three months. That is still low as a share of total emails received, but pretty high given the word was used, er, zero times by anyone on the City desk over the same period.
Of those 150 or so, most PR firms only used the word once. But a handful seem to have got into the habit, for reasons only they can explain. Their clients may be keen to know how their fees are spent....
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