Words also just rotate around in popularity like any other fad. Remember synergy? Paradigm shifts? Thinking outside the box?

Academia isn’t immune to memes, far from it. In the semi-contained world of higher education, trends in words and phrases are even more pronounced and likely to spread.

If this is evidence of LLM usage, it could easily be the machines reflecting back trends. These things pick up on subtle cues in your prompts to match tone with you as well so I wouldn’t rule out human influence either in prompts or the RLHF process.