Is this the new goblin problem?
How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
621–630 of 650 posts
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#622Earlier 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.
In my professional life, I've been told that documents I wrote in 2016 sound like they were written by AI. I put significant work into getting my message across clearly and then to have it dismissed was rough. I no longer put a lot of effort into ensuring documents feel right when writing them.
It just adds another layer of editing. For me, writing is always a multi-step process, even when many steps are condensed (in quick comments or IMs). First, dump the thoughts quickly in a rough form. Then settle the basic order of points and paragraphs. Fix the grammar. Simplify where needed. Fix the grammar again, then work on wording/phrases/metaphors if needed. Decide the final shape of the text, and do the last correctness pass. Before LLMs, I was done at this point. Now I need to also de-LLM the text before publishing/sending.
The problem is that the word "just" in the first sentence above does a lot of work. You want to get rid of even slightly LLM-adjacent phrases, just to be sure. And you have to do that pass always, for any writing that somebody else can read. It's less of a problem in larger texts, but the "de-LLM-ing tax" is pretty substantial on quick Slack messages. I think the time between typing the last dot and hitting Enter has easily doubled for me over the past 2 years. For now, most of the motivation is still just my care for the written word, but it is increasingly expected as a signal that I'm not letting an LLM write for me. I don't like where this is going, to say the least...
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#623Earlier 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?
Seeing as they are, very clearly, just trying to toot their own horn to the beat of the “AI Sucks” drum, I wouldn’t think so.
LLMs are tiring to read, but a self-entitled “[amateur] writer with very good English skills and expansive vocabulary”? Now that’s just exhausting.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
God help me if Claude starts using inline parentheticals, I might just have to take a vow of (online) silence.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who (perhaps) overuses in-line parentheticals... sometimes to the point where I'd have parentheticals within parentheticals!
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#625I’d like it if my leadership stopped using load-bearing, and others like “shape” and “estate”.
In the past, when you saw a new term of art it came from some book being passed around leadership (like Architect Elevator) or some new training program. “Platform mindset”, “Shift-left everything” etc.
These days, they are all coming from LLMs. You can probably infer which contracts we have from the wording of all-hands messages.
I even LIKE “shape”, it’s nice and generic and everyone immediately understands it. I just see it as an obvious low-impact brainwashing, and wonder what other effects there are that we don’t notice.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#626I 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 agree with you, but after the 14th load-bearing thing in a day, it does get a bit tiresome; especially since words have meaning. I’d expect OpenSSL to be load-bearing; but no, that one-line function isn’t load-bearing. It might be important or even widely used throughout the codebase, but it’s not bearing the load of everything above it. What?
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#627I did something like this in my global `CLAUDE.md`... https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude... > It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself"), so to avoid the confusion whenever you would use a first-person pronoun, always use the jocular name "Clod" instead of a pronoun like "I" or "me" or "my". (Can have fu…
I laughed a good 20 seconds at this, and even typing Clod makes me chuckle. This is great, can you please provide us with more guidance of the sort? I wanna laugh a bit at my LLM.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course. The "content" is how humans communicate with each other, it doesn't just exist for its own sake (except in some degenerate cases). If you know that a human has authored it, you can infer their intent and thought-process from various choices they made across it. There's no such thing as intentional choices when the content is generated though.
I believe that the “thought process” of humans is just another automatic process albeit more sophisticated because it is running on a far more powerful processor that has evolved over millions of years and was honed by many more years of fine tuning in a complex social system. The difference is only a matter of degree.
Sure, but there's so much more going on in a human than "a thought process running on a powerful processor" that current models do not even begin to approximate. We're not some brains steering meatmechs they're trapped in, we're complex machines consisting of interconnected systems running continuous processes with feedback loops that brains are only a single part of (and LLM-like processes in our brains are also only one of many things that happen in a brain). So-called "agents" are nowhere close to having actual agency yet. Once that changes, I may become actually interested in their outputs and opinions in other contexts than technical curiosities, but I'm not convinced that I'll still be around when that happens (if it even happens before we manage to make ourselves extinct anyway).
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't really helping to be nice, though. It's outsourcing the hard part in a way that presents as "nice and helpful" and frames yourself as knowledgeable, skilled, experienced, or trustworthy in a way that doesn't match reality.
Suppose I'm trying to explain how a project works and as part of that I need to explain about an algorithm I found in a book, are people going to object if I say "Here's an explanation from " and quote a few paragraphs? Suppose instead I found that algorithm by describing the task I needed an algorithm for and asking an AI for the most used algorithms for that task. I picked one of its suggestions, read up on it to m…
> "Here is a good explanation from on how this algorithm works. I have verified that this is accurate", and quote the AIs explanation how is that different from the book case?
I mean this is fine really, as long it's clear to me that you've actually done something with the content. And it's okay when I already know you and know that you actually do the research on the topics the LLM retrieves for you. It's much different when you don't know each other and you just get some generated response. I have no clue if you've digested the information and verified it before giving it to me, or just tossed it over the fence.
The big issue I have with it in this thread is things like blog posts and comments that seem straight up copied from the LLM. At that point the blog seems meaningless to me. It's not the author's work, it's ChatGPT or Claude, so why would I bother reading their prompt's output. I go to a blog for their writing, not the LLM.
Similarly, I go to a concert to hear the artists. I would be very uninterested to a see an empty stage and hearing an AI generated "live version" blasting through the speakers.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suppose I'm trying to explain how a project works and as part of that I need to explain about an algorithm I found in a book, are people going to object if I say "Here's an explanation from " and quote a few paragraphs? Suppose instead I found that algorithm by describing the task I needed an algorithm for and asking an AI for the most used algorithms for that task. I picked one of its suggestions, read up on it to m…
something akin to degrees of separation from the source, considering people have been complaining about this when it was "here's an explanation from google/wikipedia/stackoverflow" long before llms
Yeah, essentially. Just the first google hit without checking if it actually fits the use case. Or just throwing you a insanely long article about a topic. Maybe tell me what section it's in, or briefly tell me why it's relevant.