Primary meaning A style of communication or writing characterized by the use of 'gānhuà' (幹話), which are statements that are seemingly profound or meaningful but are actually empty, nonsensical, or deliberately misleading, often employed for humorous, sarcastic, or manipulative purposes; 'bullshit literature' or 'empty talk discourse'. It often involves using jargon, clichés, or overly formal language to obscure a lack of substance.

We introduce Drivelology, a unique linguistic phenomenon characterised as "nonsense with depth", utterances that are syntactically coherent yet pragmatically paradoxical, emotionally loaded, or rhetorically subversive.

Previous studies have explored the difficulty for LLMs to understand humour, sarcasm, and irony. However, Drivelology differs fundamentally from these phenomena by employing more complex, non-linear narratives and deeper ambiguities, making it a uniquely challenging benchmark for assessing LLMs’ semantic comprehension.

Due to budget constraints, we were unable to evaluate stronger proprietary LLMs such as GPT-4.5, Claude-3.7, or DeepSeek R1, as their usage costs are prohibitively high. For open-source models, we restricted our experiments to 14B parameter models because of limited computational resources, and were unable to run larger models within our available infrastructure. We encourage researchers and the broader community to expand on this work by evaluating larger or more advanced LLMs as resources permit.