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How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

jola.dev

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Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#431

Post by unknownfuture »

doctoboggan wrote: post #309

I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of prose and I see those same claudisms. I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize…

Honestly--and I say this as a flesh-and-blood human--I continue to be pissed off that AI has ruined load-bearing parts of my vocabulary. You're absolutely right that it's starting to trigger me when I read random blog posts and come across these linguistic ticks, but I can't help but be resentful. Humans invented language and now robots are coopting it.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#432

Post by phoghed »

kokanee wrote: post #401
phoghed wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve asked essentially the same question many times to many people, the short answer is “yes” because it’s a matter of ideology not logic for them. I get just as mad about shitty human output as I do about shitty LLM output. The bad thing about LLMs is that they have increased the volume of shit most people have to sift through. When you open a requirements doc and it’s got 13 load bearing em dashes on the first page…

I want to know when I'm consuming AI content because the source of information matters. I want to know what was at stake for the author, what motives they had and didn't have, what biases I should be aware of, and, for example, whether I'm reading content farmed slop that exists solely to attract ad impressions.

You still won’t know even if it’s labeled though. Someone could put an incredible amount of effort into writing something, not be satisfied with some aspect, and have an LLM refactor it for example. Now you’ve got a lot of em dashes and you issue a shallow dismissal.

There was an HN submission recently where the author spent a lot of time and effort working with an LLM to write a story and get the LLM to follow a specific style and whatnot. Wish I could recall it offhand. Many commenters were very upset when they found out it was LLM generated, even though they couldn’t tell while reading it.

Basically what matters to me is some combo of how much effort went into it, and how accurate it is.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#435

Post by renegade-otter »

rpdillon wrote: post #353
doctoboggan wrote: post #309

I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of prose and I see those same claudisms. I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize…

I didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.

The one Claudism I will never ever use is "synthesize". I don't even know where that came from - no one talks or writes like that - "I can synthesize that for you".

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#437

Post by renegade-otter »

phs318u wrote: post #425
greedo wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a thank you message on Teams to my coworkers on a project, and half of them thought I had used AI to write it. As a professional writer in a previous life, I was astonished. Then they told me that they had never seen me write anything more than a sentence or two so naturally they assumed something relatively polished had to be AI assisted.

Though I haven’t been a professional writer, I’ve been a good writer with an expansive vocabulary since high school where English was my best subject despite being a STEM maven. I hate the fact that what was previously considered an advantageous skill is now a millstone in public use. I hate having to dumb down and self—censor in order to avoid being accused of using (or being) an LLM. Even though my writing has a fe…

When I write these days, I am more aggressive in using "I", so it's clear it's my own voice. Generally, an LLM is less prone to self-reference like that unless it's prompted to, I guess.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#438

Post by calf »

esikich wrote: post #281
infogulch wrote: post #254

LLMs are far from great writers. They struggle to form long coherent sentences and lean on punctuation like emdash and semicolon to ensure grammatical correctness when splicing together short phrases. This makes me wonder if the reason why agents love weird punctuation is because the labs run the base models through a RL training step that forces them to correct their grammar; but instead of rewriting short spliced s…

They are great writers if you tell them what you want. If you're unable to properly articulate the writing style you would like as you would a software spec, well, garbage in, garbage out.

That's not fair. To most users this would not be an obvious thing to do, unlike software/scientific/analytic uses of LLMs.

So it's not a matter of inability but rather awareness and know-how.

Then secondly, humans learn to write intuitively and heuristically (for example "paragraphs should align sentence subjects with an identifiable flow of conceptual main characters/actors" is an entire chapter of expert writing advice traditionally taught at the undergrad level). The act and teaching the act are different beasts. The way to specify would have no objective, clear best practice to do so: Even an English teacher or a language expert would be challenged to come up with a concise list of instructions to set up an LLM to output something of sufficient quality.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#439

Post by grimcompanion »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #354
doctoboggan wrote: post #309

I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of prose and I see those same claudisms. I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize…

It's going to be more difficult to distinguish as humans are now using those terms.

Yep, I've heard humans use load-bearing twice in the past week, versus approximately never in a software eng context before that.
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