936. Have you ever wondered about the nuanced differences between "aspirational" and "inspirational"? Today, we look at a newer, more cynical meaning of "aspirational." Plus, you've probably heard all about the promise of ChatGPT. Well, we dig into stories of people who were trying to save time, but got in trouble instead.
936. Have you ever wondered about the nuanced differences between "aspirational" and "inspirational"? Today, we look at a newer, more cynical meaning of "aspirational." Plus, you've probably heard all about the promise of ChatGPT. Well, we dig into stories of people who were trying to save time, but got in trouble instead.
The ChatGPT segment was written by freelance writer Brenda Thomas, who has also worked as an online educator and instructional designer of online courses.
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TEASER: I have finally stopped buying aspirational groceries!
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, we’ll look at the difference between two lofty words, and then we'll talk about some interesting problems with tools like ChatGPT.
Let's get started.
'Aspirational' Versus 'Inspirational'
by Mignon Fogarty
A listener named Kristi asked this question: "Can you explain the difference between 'inspirational' and 'aspirational'? I started hearing people using the word 'aspirational' where I thought 'inspirational' would work. From context, they seemed the same to me, and when I looked [at] the difference, I still couldn't really figure out how I'd use them differently."
Thanks, Kristi. This question caught my eye because I still remember the first time I heard the word "aspirational" because it seemed new to me. I was in New York meeting with my publisher for the first time — which would have been about 16 years ago now — and while he was explaining things to me about the publishing industry, books about arts and crafts came up. He said books about projects like working with stained glass or even writing a novel were "aspirational" in that people want to do these things, but most people never actually do the things described in the books. They simply aspire to do them.
There's an older definition of "aspirational" that goes back to the late 1800s and means something like "having aspirations." Here's an example from a 2012 Harvard Business Review interview about looking for a job. The interviewer asks how much of a job search should be "dreaming, and inspiring, and sort of spreading your wings, and how much do you really need to be grounded, realistic?"
And the interviewee says, "I hate to tell people not to be idealistic and aspirational, and there is a time and a place for that. And my initial instinct upon hearing that question is [to] split it 50-50." She says to give 50% of your time, energy, and resources to "areas that are … idealistic and aspirational. And take the other 50% and invest in realistic opportunities that may come to fruition."
But a newer, but very related meaning of "aspirational," with it being used essentially as a marketing term, only goes back to 1981, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The first example there is from the "Wall Street Journal" and reads, "Harrah's is offering free parking and trying what it calls 'aspirational' TV advertising that forgoes views of casino and hotel interiors and furnishings in favor of a stylish male customer who, while dressing, daydreams of showgirls, gourmet dinners and gaming tables." Essentially images of the things he most hopes he'll be doing.
So it's always risky to attribute the coining of a term to the first citation, because it may not really be the first use — the word could have been floating around in the culture before it appeared somewhere dictionary makers could make note of it — but there's a small chance this meaning of "aspirational" was invented by a casino! Which, I don't know, just strikes me as funny.
But here are a couple of other examples to help you get a better sense of the meaning.
This one from the blog Hyperbole and a Half:
The worst part is when you realize all of your aspirational groceries have gone bad and you need to throw them away.
And this one is from an interview in Glossy with a jewelry designer who said, "I don't want us to be an aspirational brand … we try to give people things they can afford."
A Google Ngram search shows a steady increase in the use of the word "aspirational" starting around 1990 and, for some reason, picking up around 2010. And it's consistently been more popular in British English than American English, at least in the books included in the Google Ngram database. [Ngram screenshot on laptop]
"Inspirational" is a far more common word, and there are about six times more examples of it in the Corpus of Contemporary American English than there are for "aspirational." We have sentences such as "He's an inspirational figure," "She has an inspirational message," and "I find it so inspirational to see someone achieve their dream." Overall, just tons of examples referring to inspirational books, articles, songs, stories, and speakers.
So to sum up, you can be aspirational when you aspire to big things, and today, "aspirational" is also often used by marketers to describe a product or purchase that people want, especially if it's something people believe will make them better in some way or will help them live the life they want to be living, or something that seems like something better people or richer people have. By comparison, something inspirational is designed to inspire, to fill you with the feeling that you can do something.
The way I think about it is that an author may design a book to inspire people to make stained glass, for example, and people may even say they found the book to be inspirational. It did inspire them; it made them want to make stained glass, imagine themselves making stained glass, or even actually doing it.
But the purchase of the book is often aspirational in that people bought it because they wanted to be the kind of person who makes stained glass or they hoped they would find the time to make stained glass.
I hope that helps. Thanks for the question, Kristi.
//
The Surprising Dangers of ChatGPT
by Brenda Thomas
Do you know what Seattle public schools, Bank of America, and Italy all have in common? Don’t worry, that question isn’t a setup for a punchline. What they all have in common is that they all banned ChatGPT in some way. And those are not the only schools, companies, and countries that banned ChatGPT in 2023. It seems that ChatGPT bans are being imposed or lifted on a daily basis as school administrators and teachers, business executives and managers, and government officials grapple with this new tool. Some of the problems have to do with internet privacy, but our focus here today will be on ethical and legal issues related to accuracy, plagiarism, and copyright.
Even if you haven’t used ChatGPT, you’ve likely heard or read about this technology that launched in late 2022 and has been breaking records ever since. ChatGPT had one million users in its first five days and got to 100 million active users in its first two months making it the fastest growing app of all time. To put those statistics into perspective, it took nine months for TikTok to reach 100 million users, two and half years for Instagram, and four and a half years for Facebook.
ChatGPT stands for chat generative pre-training transformer. Whew! Gosh! Basically, it’s a natural language bot. Sometimes it’s referred to as artificial intelligence, even though it technically isn’t. As John Loeffler, writing for techradar.com, explains, ChatGPT is not a rational actor; it doesn’t understand what you’re saying. Instead, it recognizes keywords and generates a probabilistic response. ChatGPT can’t function beyond the parameters set by its developers to mimic human language patterns, but it does that very well.
With all these tools, you can write a prompt to create a poem about dogs written in the style of Emily Dickinson, write an email to bank customers explaining compounding interest, or prepare a lesson plan about astronomy for sixth graders and in a matter of seconds, the chatbot responds. It can even reply to follow-up questions as if you’re having a conversation with it. However, [big pause] the responses it gives are not always correct. When one blogger asked ChatGPT to “Please write a blog post discussing South Dakota’s oldest and youngest governors,” the response was well-written and plausible sounding, but the name and the description of the accomplishments of the supposed youngest governor were entirely fabricated. Others have noticed that when ChatGPT includes citations, those are often fabricated too. For example, a lawyer used ChatGPT for legal research to respond to a motion to dismiss. He trusted that the ChatGPT results were accurate, but he realized later, after he submitted it to a judge, that it was riddled with phony court cases and opinions. The judge was not amused, and the lawyer, along with a second lawyer in his firm whose name was on the briefing, was sanctioned and fined $5,000. So although ChatGPT might save you a lot of time with research and writing, it can also cause ethical and legal problems depending on how and why you use it.
The next two areas where we're going to advise you to use some caution relate to plagiarism and copyright.
Plagiarism is an ethical issue that involves copying from another source without proper citation. Basically, it’s taking credit for having written something you didn't write, which is what many people are doing with results produced by ChatGPT. Even if you change, add, or delete a few words, if you don't cite the source, it is still considered a form of plagiarism that some call patchwriting. Although the word "patchwriting" isn’t listed in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, that website currently has a page describing what patchwriting is and explaining that they're watching it for likely inclusion in the future. The online Collins Dictionary is also considering adding the word patchwriting. And some schools have already developed policies against patchwriting, so it is a word currently in use even though you may not find it in a dictionary.
While dictionary editors are considering adding the word "patchwriting," perhaps they should also consider updating "plagiarism" definitions. Currently, dictionary definitions of the words "plagiarize" or "plagiarism" refer to copying from another person without citation. However, proposed definitions for "patchwriting" use the phrases “source text” or “source material” when referring to what was plagiarized. If dictionary definitions were updated to define "plagiarism" as copying from another source, rather than from another person, then that would be more applicable to this age of increasing technological advances such as ChatGPT and similar tools that produce non-human-created content.
Moving on, although citing ChatGPT as a source might possibly address any plagiarism or patchwriting concerns, there are still copyright issues.
For example, the United States Copyright Office won't grant copyright protection for works generated by tools like ChatGPT because a work must be "human-authored" in order to be eligible. In March 2023, the U.S. Copyright Office reiterated that “copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity” and that the word “author” used in the Intellectual Property clause of the United States Constitution specifically refers to humans. So if you're planning on writing a short story or song lyrics with these tools, for example, know that you won't be able to legally copyright it.
And the U.S. Copyright Office isn't the only organization emphasizing that an author has to be human. A number of journals have updated their policies to explicitly state that ChatGPT can’t be listed as an author or co-author because authorship entails responsibility and accountability that only humans can meet.
Beyond your own work, there are also major ethical and legal questions about the material that ChatGPT is trained on and its copyright status. You might’ve heard more about this in relation to AI-generated audio and visual work, but it’s just as true for written work. Expect to see more stories and court cases addressing these issues in the coming months.
So tools like ChatGPT are fun to play with and have their uses, which many media outlets have covered breathlessly for months, and they're also likely to get even better in the near future. But while the technology might be promising, we thought you might benefit from a heads-up about the problems you may have heard about a little less.
That segment was written by freelance writer Brenda Thomas, who has also worked as an online educator and instructional designer of online courses.
And just as I was recording this show, two authors filed a class-action lawsuit against the company behind ChatGPT claiming copyright infringement because their novels were included in the training data, AND it *appears* the gaming platform Steam may be rejecting some games that rely too heavily on AI-generated graphics or text. As Brenda said, expect to see many more stories and court cases addressing these kinds of copyright issues.
Before we get to the familect story, I have a quick question from Erik about a recent episode:
"Hey, Grammar Girl. This is Erik Deckers, your occasional contributor. I just got finished listening to your segment on why ever with your question from Will, and you mentioned the term that you hear 'whithersoever' and it's an archaic term we don't use, but I have heard 'whatsoever' and 'howsoever,' and 'whosoever' once in a great great while. So that makes me wonder do we have 'wheresoever,' 'howsoever,' 'whysoever'? Do we have all of those as well? So I'm curious about that, and I look forward to your answer. Thank you. Bye."
Thanks, Erik! All of those "-soever" words do exist, EXCEPT "whysoever." So that's interesting given that "whyever" seems to be the least common of the plain "-ever" words. It didn't make the "soever" cut at all. I found all the other ones in the Oxford English Dictionary, "whosoever," "whomsoever," "whatsoever," "whensoever," "wheresoever," and "howsoever." None of them are frequently used words, but the OED says "whatsoever" is the most frequently used of this set, and a Google Ngram search shows the same thing. And "howsoever" is interesting in that the OED includes examples in which the word is split in two. For example there's a line in Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" that reads, "How low so ever the matter, I hope in God for high words." Thanks for the question.
And now, I have a familect story.
"Hi, Grammar Girl. My name is Tommy. I've been an avid listener for 15 years now, and I'm calling in with a familect. My husband and I are both really fond of non-standard plurals, and in particular there are odd or silly singulars. So for example, we'll always point out an interesting graffito since the Italian word 'graffiti' is the plural of the singular 'graffito.' And of course, we'll seek out other ridiculous hypercorrections. So I might sample a single spaghetto from the pot to see if the spaghetti is cooked enough. Well, two words that have become part of our regular vocabulary are both Japanese words: emoji and sushi that we treat like Latin plurals in order to refer to a singular example the same way that fungi is the singular of fungus. So for example our cat has a package of four cat toys shaped(?) like different sushi and we'll ask her if she wants us to throw a sushus. Or we may go into our emoji keyboard in order to type out a singular emojus. Thanks, Grammar Girl. That's our familect."
Thanks for the call, Tommy. That's a lot of fun.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part. And this is actually a good time to call because I'm a little low on stories.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, Thanks to our audio engineer, Nathan Semes, and our director of podcasts, Adam Cecil, who has sent 18 international postcards through the postcard swapping site Postcrossing since he joined in February. Thanks also to our digital operations specialist Holly Hutchings, our marketing associate Davina Tomlin, and our ad operations specialist Morgan Christianson.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.