

After you use ChatGPT for a bit, you will start recognizing its style of writing in posts and comments. I’ve seen dozens of obviously ChatGPT generated posts or replies on Reddit and Lemmy. Usually there will be a person who already replied to them something like “Thanks, ChatGPT”, because it is that obvious. This only happens with naive prompts though, if you ask ChatGPT to present its answer to your prompt in a different style (for example, mimic some famous writer, or being cheerful/angry/excited and avoid overly safe language), it will immediately start writing differently and there’s likely no limit on variety of writing styles you can pull out of it with enough effort of just asking it to write this or that way.
It is what it feels like, but it’s not really 100% this way (yet). It is a bad self-reinforcing cognitive bias: we think “forums are dead, that’s why we stick to the sitename” instead of actually finding dozens of still alive forums and going there, in turn sitename gets more populated while forums feel more dead. But there are still plenty alive. Also, there are relatively new kinds of forums which sometimes work very well for their niche, like Discourse communities for example.