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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

#571

Post by BretonForearm »

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…

Who uses an em dash in "self-censor"?

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#572

Post by jcattle »

demosthanos wrote: post #334

The biggest consistent tell for LLM writing is when the conversation leaks through into the final prose. You read along with the text and things seem to be going fine until all of the sudden it starts arguing against a position that no one has actually taken and which doesn't feature elsewhere in the text at all. Then it drops that and goes on for a while before doing the whole thing again about a totally different t…

The thing is that LLMs can only ever go forward. It might go into one direction, once that direction is in the context it will realize that it doesn't work, but can't delete. So it has to backtrack (or double down, see the whole seahorse emoji breakdown).

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#573

Post by nathias »

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.

what do you mean, which tells are good writing practices?

as I see them they are all truly terrible even if authored by humans

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#574

Post by DCKing »

I don't mind this in the agent workflows themselves, but I think this is hideous in the code and encourages agents to become even more verbose in the future.

I have a workflow to create PRs where at the end, I spin up a subagent that goes through the PR to 1) remove the bulk of the comments and 2) attempt to normalize it for human consumption (I ask it to optimize wording for junior developers and non-native speakers).

I use Haiku for it, hoping that a dumber model will do a better job. I have noticed in brief experimentation that even Sonnet will sympathize too much with the need of excessive comments and is not a good adverserial reviewer for slop comments.

After that workflow runs I still need to go in and manually correct, but it's a lot less than vanilla Opus. It really feels like the problem of slop comments has gotten worse as models has gotten smarter.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#575

Post by embedding-shape »

BretonForearm wrote: post #571
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…

Who uses an em dash in "self-censor"?

Not LLMs, probably. Unless prompted for, of course.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#576

Post by embedding-shape »

andsoitis wrote: post #559
GoatOfAplomb wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently a bit annoyed by ChatGPT responding with something like "I can't tell you how many times I've lost small tools in an engine bay" in an apparent attempt to commiserate.

Reprimand it for lying.

What's the fun in the reprimand when you know the target can't really feel it?

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#577

Post by laurauzcategui »

While everyone here is talking about output, but perhaps we also get to think about the input we give.

Funnily enough, somehow as we use AI more and more, our mind is becoming bias towards how these AI's write and less how we do want to write.

Whenever I write something, I pass it to claude to correct my grammar (non-native speaker) but I have to be very specific about not changing my writing style and/or the writing itself.

It's annoying because even though I love recommendations, I started to put some "rules" around it to avoid changing the content and look like everyone else post.

I love using AI for my day to day, but now I'm more careful when trying to edit text with AI because it just looks like the average text and our brain get used to it, it we don't course correct fast enough.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#578

Post by worldthruword »

costco wrote: post #284
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…

If you put important Anthropic blog posts like the Fable announcement or J-Space through Pangram, you get 100% human written. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the code there is written by AI, I think this is an admission that AI writing is slop and AI code is pretty good.

Can we standardize English and structure it similarly to programming language?

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#579

Post by thundoe »

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.

My manager talks like Claude and often goes on for hours, we’re laughing at them so much in private chats day&night

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#580

Post by azalemeth »

Waterluvian wrote: post #501
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.

Honest take: Claudisms have become a load-bearing part of my vocabulary.

If I see the phrase "The honest take: I was wrong" again I will scream...
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