Abstract
For better or worse, LLMs are by now used routinely for scientific writing.\footnote{This paper is no exception; we did use AI to assist with writing some of the sections (see Acknowledgments).} Many have noticed that recent models fill papers with unnecessary antithesis, stating over and over what the work does not do, in ways that do not contribute to its precision or quality of expression and annoy reviewers \emph{rather than impressing them}. We study the construction \emph{rather than} in ACL papers from 2019, ACL-style arXiv papers from 2026, and papers written by GPT models from the same titles and abstracts. Its rate in 2026 is seven times the 2019 rate, and higher still in the GPT papers. Two annotators, blind to the source, find almost no 2019 use \emph{annoying} and about one in ten 2026 uses; they seldom agree on which, yet about half of 2026 papers contain a use that annoys each of them. \emph{Annoying} uses present the rejected alternative less favorably than legitimate uses. Raters of preference data and open reward models favor the construction, and an instruction to be honest promotes it. We conjecture that it is a side effect of post-training on pairwise preferences, which credit a disavowal in a single response and cannot register its cost across a text.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10092
