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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

#491

Post by zurtri »

qurren wrote: post #328
infogulch wrote: post #202

Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue. Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,0…

I hate all this "smoke", personally. Smoke tests, smoking guns, ...

Yep! I too hate the phrase "smoke test".

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#493

Post by sheept »

cafebeen wrote: post #359
rpdillon wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.

Even em dashes have been discouraged by some writers [0] before LLMs because they're easy to overuse.

[0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/05/em-dashes-why-write...

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#494

Post by nomel »

Arathorn wrote: post #485

I've been keeping a record of the increasingly opinionated vocab it fixates on: * Projection (it seems to love to describe one data structure as a projection of another) * Strand (if some data gets isolated/stuck, it's "on a strand" or simply "a strand") * Load-bearing (obviously) * Frontier (the leaf on a tree) * Quiescence (waiting for an algorithm to settle - I guess this one is legit) * Honest (obviously) * Resid…

I notice there's a whole tech bro speak it gets into anytime it approaches web related tasks around auth, to the point where it stops using complete sentences, making them ambiguous and borderline nonsense. I have to periodically tell it "Speak professionally and use complete sentences." so I can understand what it's even saying. I've even pasted the output to another session to see if it was me, but Claude can't even understand what tech bro web auth Claude writes.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#495

Post by optimalquiet »

renegade-otter wrote: post #437
phs318u wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've found they are increasingly doing this in ways that are somewhat creepy. For instance, you might share something, and the AI will say, "One of the things I most frequently notice..." or "What I often feel..."

It used to be that the "you are not an I and you must not pretend to have experiences" training that produced the "As a Large Language model, I don't have experiences like humans do, but..." in replies I remember from the early days of LLM chatbots kept these to the minimum.

But one of the things I most frequently notice is that LLMs increasingly make those claims, about things that are very obviously out of their wheelhouse as far as even theoretical experiences, like pretending to have played a video game.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#496

Post by Sabinus »

Barbing wrote: post #394
demosthanos wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude's "honest" is an interesting example because we can trace it to a specific document that it was trained on extensively: the "Constitution" is identified to Claude in its training as the core of what it is, and it uses the word "honest" or a derivative 57 times, including having a whole section on it. > Honesty is a core aspect of our vision for Claude’s ethical character. Indeed, while we want Claude’s honesty…

Do technologists have more respect for the idea you can train a model to be on your side with a constitution than they might’ve at first? I'm sure the concept seemed just about purely preposterous to many when the models were in their infancy. Now I figure instead it seems mostly preposterous to many. (Though I guess Anthropic‘s success doesn’t necessarily prove anything about the constitution)

Anthropic train it to 'reason morally' based on the constitution's principals.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/teaching-claude-why

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#497

Post by optimalquiet »

rpdillon wrote: post #357
sublinear wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah wow fascinating! It's almost like LLM output quality was never the point from a business perspective. Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words. The words are not so important to get the idea across, but LLMs only model language. The problem is fundamental. There's no workaround. Averaging out word usage might even make the problem worse.

> Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words. I learned about this opinion recently. It's interesting to me, because I very much think through words. I have an internal monologue that is running most of the time, and I often talk to myself, just start writing, or even record myself and transcribe to work through ideas, proposals, risks, etc. My understand is that some people don't have an internal…

Agreed. I think in and visualize in words, generally not images. I see something akin to [Spreeder](https://www.spreeder.com/app.html) in my head most of the time, and I often can somatically feel punctuation.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#498

Post by customguy »

renegade-otter wrote: post #435
rpdillon wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

    Fighting hard to catalogue
    Sacrifice for the disguise
    Disconnecting analogues
    Anything to synthesize
    Nothing here is what it seems
    Nothing can be recognized
    Perfect fit for the machine
    Everyone is synthesized
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70KCZxDbgko

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#499

Post by colordrops »

Arathorn wrote: post #485

I've been keeping a record of the increasingly opinionated vocab it fixates on: * Projection (it seems to love to describe one data structure as a projection of another) * Strand (if some data gets isolated/stuck, it's "on a strand" or simply "a strand") * Load-bearing (obviously) * Frontier (the leaf on a tree) * Quiescence (waiting for an algorithm to settle - I guess this one is legit) * Honest (obviously) * Resid…

Honest caveat

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#500

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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