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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

#601

Post by greengreengrass »

kevincox wrote: post #504
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…

Yes, I especially see this in code comments. You will get a PR where the comments reference an approach that wasn't the previous state and isn't the state of the PR. You can basically hear the dev telling Claude to take a new approach and now it is so fixated on the old approach being wrong that it litters the whole patch with traces of it despite now being irrelevant.

Exactly this. Most of my time writing code is now not necessarily spent writing the said code, but going through whatever Claude or some other agentic process produced and tidying the comments to be less temporally sensitive to the conversation that produced it.

The problem is that process of not writing the code, but just editing what the LLM produced – and somewhat mindless editing at that (I'm editing comments, not LoC!) – leads to a loss of focus and all the perils of human procrastination that entails (hello, writing comments on HN).

I've tried to prompt Claude et al. not to do this - but whatever I've tried so far, even meta-prompting it to ask why it ignored my instructions, it doesn't work, doesn't stick, and I can't find a good way to stop it.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#603

Post by vidarh »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #600

I've been looking around for skills that help with improving AI prose, and found these: (1) Avoid AI Writing - https://github.com/conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing (there is a similar "humanizer" skill that (1) subsumes) (2) Agent style: https://github.com/yzhao062/agent-style (3) Journal-adapt (style transfer from your writings): https://github.com/WantongC/journal-adapt-writing-skill I find it useful to set up dynamic…

Re: style-transfer, I simply point it at examples of my writing and asks it to use sub-agents and review paragraph by paragraph for consistency with my writing-style. I do the "paragraph by paragraph" thing because the main agent otherwise tends to get sloppy.

Some checks for repetition and particularly egregious quirks that are not style specific tends to also be helpful (e.g. Claude at least used to have a thing for using numbers ending in "47" if something calls for random numbers), but most stylistic ticks are fixed by the above.

Depends if you just want it to not sound obnoxious or whether you want to fool an AI checker - the latter would benefit from more, but it's not really something I care about.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#604

Post by vidarh »

SoftTalker wrote: post #392
cafebeen wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, that's where the AI got them: the training data. These phrases and cliches were very prevalent especially in corporate "white papers" and memos and marketing materials. There was a time when "stove pipe" was a common one too, along with "silo." But the LLMs really seem to fixate on using the same ones in the same places all the time. I guess that's because that's the highest probability construction.

Consider each LLM as one personality. We're getting corporate bullshit from a large number of different personalities, so even when they are similar they are still filtered through many different lenses.

Most of us are only dealing with a handful of hyper-productive LLMs, so it makes sense that the LLM-ticks get old much quicker.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#605

Post by vidarh »

optimalquiet wrote: post #495
renegade-otter wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

I worked on a fine-tuning projects where the ultimate customer was a major provider, and their style guide at the time required us to fail any response that used "I". I've noticed the same as you, so I guess that is out the window.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#606

Post by kelvinjps10 »

Shorel wrote: post #488
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…

I love that in the Spanish cyberspace the tendency is to use more sophisticated and rich vocabulary, and it is common to point out obvious errors. If you understand Spanish, check out pedrititox B-)

There is also a running meme about it, it's funny

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#608

Post by jappgar »

xmcp123 wrote: post #209
jappgar wrote: post #38

I don't really care if it says load-bearing or belt and suspenders so long as it's using them correctly, which it mostly does. I don't know how programmers, who are so used to staring at the same handful of keywords every day for decades, have suddenly become so discerning. Yes, Claude writes boring and predictable prose. It also writes boring and predictable code. That's good!

I hate it because put together, it all increases the cognitive load of understanding what it's saying. It routinely invents phrases, and every single one makes me pause and think "okay, what the fuck does that mean". Half the time the phrases are incoherrent.

My point is that you get used to it. I don't like if aesthetically, but I like that it has an aesthetic at all.

I have coworkers who overuse phrases, oftentimes incorrectly. It doesn't annoy me because I'm familiar with their writing I know what they actually mean.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#609

Post by phs318u »

leetrout wrote: post #479
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…

Serious question: is the em dash misuse a joke?

Strange. I’d guess that it’s an iOS autocorrect thing as that’s what I was using when I posted that. But I’m trying to reproduce it and can’t.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#610

Post by phs318u »

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"?

I didn’t even notice it util someone above you called it out. I’ve tried to reproduce it and can’t. Don’t even know how to get an em-dash on an iOS keyboard.

EDIT: a long press on the dash key gives you the option of a long dash but I definitely didn’t do that. Or at least, have no conscious memory of doing that.

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