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How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

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Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#101

Post by bobson381 »

danielvaughn wrote: post #93

It's not that it uses certain phrases, it's that it settles on predictable speech patterns and uses them incessantly. What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating; we just call it a speaking style. But when a machine does it, it drives us crazy. Very interesting psychological phenomenon there.

Fascinatingly, I'm now so allergic to certain LLM-phrases that I immediately noticed your use of Not X but Y in this comment. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but it's a funny illustration of how odd this language rabbit hole has been!

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#102

Post by ashishbroken »

danielvaughn wrote: post #93

It's not that it uses certain phrases, it's that it settles on predictable speech patterns and uses them incessantly. What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating; we just call it a speaking style. But when a machine does it, it drives us crazy. Very interesting psychological phenomenon there.

If it uses a specific style for each user then this would still be fine. Problem is it does the same style for everyone. We need personality

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#103

Post by lambda »

danielvaughn wrote: post #93

It's not that it uses certain phrases, it's that it settles on predictable speech patterns and uses them incessantly. What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating; we just call it a speaking style. But when a machine does it, it drives us crazy. Very interesting psychological phenomenon there.

It drives us crazy because everyone is using the same 2-3 different machines. So rather than each person having their own unique speaking style, the whole world (or, everyone that publishes direct LLM output) is now speaking in the same couple of styles.

And these machines all tend to converge on very similar styles; they have huge amounts of overlap in training data (much of it being already obnoxious internet marketing), they frequently train on each others outputs, and the RLHF process has a tendency to emphasize certain kinds of "cheap win" styles of speech.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#106

Post by lambda »

bobson381 wrote: post #101
danielvaughn wrote: post #93

It's not that it uses certain phrases, it's that it settles on predictable speech patterns and uses them incessantly. What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating; we just call it a speaking style. But when a machine does it, it drives us crazy. Very interesting psychological phenomenon there.

Fascinatingly, I'm now so allergic to certain LLM-phrases that I immediately noticed your use of Not X but Y in this comment. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but it's a funny illustration of how odd this language rabbit hole has been!

It's really frustrating, because now when I want to write something like a "not X but Y" or "you're absolutely right," I have to stop and decide if I want to self-censor to avoid sounding like a bot.

Sometimes those constructs are actually useful, but man has their overuse really killed them!

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#107

Post by mhitza »

pocketarc wrote: post #11

In the olden days, I enjoyed Opus 3 because it was easy to have it sound way more human than GPT. Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death, it’s so incredibly hard to have them write in a different voice than their default. I put together a skill to review its writing and have it edit its own output (e.g. code comments), which does make a difference, but isn’t…

> Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death

This has also lead to unrelated associations by which some people went from seeing better coding capabilities and extrapolate to assuming better thinking overall. One only has to watch youtube videos of AI "normies" trying to use LLMs the intended way to see that the improvements on coding doesn't translate to other applications. Basically from AGI "goals" they are now hyperfocused on coding agents, until the next marketing breakthrough rears its head.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#108

Post by hnav »

danielvaughn wrote: post #93

It's not that it uses certain phrases, it's that it settles on predictable speech patterns and uses them incessantly. What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating; we just call it a speaking style. But when a machine does it, it drives us crazy. Very interesting psychological phenomenon there.

it’s not a psychological phenomenon. If a human engineer constantly used pompous language to deliver unvetted information (the number of claude slop root-cause analyses i’ve read where “the smoking gun” is a red herring) we’d rightly consider them a moron

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#109

Post by yetanotherjosh »

The real problem is not terms like "load-bearing," which communicate clearly enough. It's the constant invention of cryptic shorthand terms and phrases that have no referent, and end up acting like a puzzle to be decoded. This is often paired with hyphenation, but not always:

"The current behavior paper" -> The behavior in the running system that was previously described as papered over.

"Marker transport over-claim" -> The inaccurate review finding on the object's sentinel flag in the API response.

I suppose the cryptic/invented language problem is about token efficiency? But this sort of token efficiency is extremely difficult to deal with when it comes to conversation with a human about complex system. It might be efficient inside reasoning blocks, but when the model generates the final turn text, it should avoid this, as it's brutally inefficient due to the time spent wondering what each uniquely coined phrase means and having to ask for constant clarifications, which then you have to wait for another turn, eating up time and context while it burns more xhigh reasoning just thinking about how to explain its own awful language.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#110

Post by timcobb »

Does anyone have a theory for what causes Claude to speak this way? A few months ago OpenAI came out with a bit on "gremlins". It's strange IMO that Anthropic hasn't addressed how irritating, dare I say oppressive, Claude can be. Codex is a breath of fresh air. I hope they fix it soon. If product folks at Anthropic think it's charming, it's not, it's terrible.
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