AI vocabulary · in today's fast-paced world
The fix for in today's fast-paced world is deleting the sentence
Every other page in this family is about a single word. This one is about an opener: the first sentence of a paragraph, an email, a LinkedIn post, that exists to buy time before the model commits to a claim. That's a structural habit, not a vocabulary choice, so the fix looks different too. You don't replace the phrase with a better one. You delete the sentence it lives in and start with the second sentence instead.
In today's fast-paced world is a slot-filler: a sentence a model writes before it has decided what it's arguing, so it reaches for scene-setting instead of a claim. underslop's linter matches the phrase directly, no synonym list required, because a stock opener has almost no legitimate variants. Swapping in a fancier opening line doesn't fix the sentence. Deleting it and starting with whatever came second does.
What reaching for it signals
A model that hasn't yet decided what to argue defaults to the most generic frame in its training data: temporal scene-setting. In today's fast-paced world buys a full sentence of runway before any actual claim has to appear, and it works in almost any context because it says nothing specific enough to be wrong. It's the opener version of a habit that shows up mid-conversation too, a reflex to fill space with a frame instead of content, just pointed at the first line of a document instead of the first line of a reply. Our social-sentiment review scored it 4 out of 5 for how consistently people call it out as an instant-delete cliche, tied with a dozen other confirmed tells and behind six that scored higher, negative parallelism and em-dash overuse among them. It's a solid, socially confirmed signal, not the single most-named phrase in the corpus, and that's why slopless already treats it as an exact-match blocklist entry rather than something to paraphrase around.
Whether underslop counts it
This is one of three phrases underslop's linter matches with a dedicated pattern rather than leaving to the greylist, alongside ever-evolving landscape and in a world where. That's a deliberate difference from a word like pivotal: a fixed six-word opener has no legitimate specialist register the way robust or leverage might in an engineer's sentence, so an exact match is safe. Score it, strip it, and check what's left. If nothing follows, the sentence had no content to begin with.
What to write instead
- In today's fast-paced world, remote work has become essential.Remote work cut our hiring radius from one city to the whole country.
- Skip the scene-setting sentence and open on the claim it was stalling in front of.
- In today's digital age, businesses need a strong online presence.A business without a website misses roughly half of local searches before a phone ever rings.
- Same fix. The opening sentence is a deletion target, not a rewrite target.
- In an ever-evolving landscape, companies must stay agile.Three competitors shipped the same feature this quarter. We shipped first.
- Real scene-setting exists when a chronology genuinely changed. It has to name the change, not gesture at one.
- In a world where information is instant, patience is rare.Support tickets used to take about four days. They now average under a day.
- Trade the vague premise for the specific number it was standing in for.
Examples
In today's fast-paced world, businesses need to stay ahead of the curve. It's not just about working harder, it's about working smarter. Companies that leverage cutting-edge technology and foster a culture of innovation will thrive in this ever-evolving landscape.
Businesses that want to stay competitive need to work smarter, not just harder. Companies that adopt better technology and build a culture of innovation are the ones that will succeed.
In today's fast-paced world, effective communication has never been more important. Whether you're leading a team or writing an email, mastering the art of communication can make all the difference.
Effective communication matters more now than it used to—whether you are leading a team or just sending an email, getting it right shifts how things land.
Questions
Why is ChatGPT so cliche?
Because a model under pressure to start writing before it has a specific claim defaults to the most generic frame available, and scene-setting openers like this one are close to universal in its training data. The cliche is what filling space looks like before an argument exists, not a vocabulary failure.
What is another way to say in today's digital age?
There's no better way to say it, because the sentence itself isn't earning its place regardless of phrasing. Delete the opener and start with whatever claim comes next. That's the fix in every case we tested, not a synonym.
What words to tell ChatGPT to avoid?
Word-level instructions get substituted around easily. Structural instructions don't: telling a model to open with its actual claim instead of a scene-setting sentence removes this phrase and a dozen close variants at once, without needing a list.
Typical ChatGPT response
An unedited response typically opens by orienting rather than asserting, praises the question, then organizes the answer into a list even when the topic doesn't call for one. The fast-paced-world opener is the essay and marketing-copy version of that same reflex, not a standalone habit.
underslop scores a small set of vocabulary tells and computes a larger greylist it deliberately does not count. Paste a draft to see which of the two your writing is tripping. The free tier caps at 500 words a run.