This list reads like, "AIs are not your typical braindead person on the street. They actually use a decent but not crazily advanced vocabulary."
I mean, "tapestry" is a great word for something that is interconnected. Why not use it?
LLM Writing Tropes.md
21–30 of 211 posts
Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md
#22Many of these are standard fare in legal writing.
Negative parallelism is a staple of briefs. "This case is not about free speech. It is about fraud." It does real work when you're contesting the other side's framing.
Tricolons and anaphora are used as persuasion techniques for closing arguments and appellate briefs.
Short punchy fragments help in persuasive briefs where judges are skimming. "The statute is unambiguous."
As with the em dash - let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md
#23"The "It's not X -- it's Y" pattern, often with an em dash. The single most commonly identified AI writing tell. Man I f*cking hate it. AI uses this to create false profundity by framing everything as a surprising reframe. One in a piece can be effective; ten in a blog post is a genuine insult to the reader. Before LLMs, people simply did not write like this at scale." This one hit home... the first time I ever saw C…
If you sound like a car ad from Road & Track , I'm going to flag you as bot. "No rough handling. No struggles to accelerate. Just pure performance. The new Toyota GT. It's not just a car—it's a revolution." Most of the tropes listed on this page give text a more "car ad" (or sometimes "movie trailer") quality. I wonder if magazine scans and press releases unduly weighted the training set.
I think it's more likely that car ads and chatbots are both optimizing for the same thing i.e. grabbing the audience's attention.
Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md
#24This makes me think of the attractiveness of overly bad writing to writers, as a challenge, the most obvious example being the bulwer-lytton award, or the instinctive ignoring of instructions from fiction magazines that might say "we don't want any stories about murderous grandparents, French bashing, bestiality, bank robbers from the future, or kind-hearted Nazis - and especially do not try to be super brilliant and funny and send us your story about kind-hearted Nazi bank-robbing french-bashing grandparents that like killing people and having sexy fun times with barnyard animals! Because every original thinker like you thinks they are the first to have come up with that idea!" and then as a writer you feel challenged to do exactly what they say they don't want because what a glorious triumph if you manage to outdo everyone and get your dreck published because it's dreck that is so bad it's good!
It does not seem like there are lots of people who are perversely inclined to write a story with all these tropes and words in it, but surely there must be some, because if you make something that beats the LLM (by being creatively good) using all the crap the LLM uses, it would seem some sort of John Henry triumph (discounting the final end of John Henry of course, which is a real downer)
Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md
#25No mention of Claude/ChatGPT's favourite new word genuine and friends? They also like using real and honest when giving advice. Far as I can tell this is a new-ish change. > Honestly? We should address X first. It's a genuine issue and we've found a real bug here. Honorable mention: "no ". I guess this helps reassure adherence to the prompt? I see that one all the time in vibe coded PRs.
Similarly, "X that actually works"
Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md
#26> (let's play cat and mouse!).
No thanks, I hate this large scale social experiment
Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md
#27Another trope: longer README.md's than anyone would make, or want.
Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md
#28Weirdly, LLMs seem to break with these instructions. They simply ignore them, almost as if the pretraining/RL weights are so heavy, no amount of system prompting can override it
It's a beauty. We can easily detect the issues with Youtubers that generate scripts from this tool. I've noticed these tropes, after 30 seconds, remove, block, and do not recommend any further. I hope to train the algorithm to detect AI scripts and stop recommending me those videos. It's honestly turned me off from YouTube so much, or I find myself going to my "subscribed" tab and going to content creators that still…
I’ve taken it one step further. YouTube as a front end is awful, and I’ve had enough. Tons of little dark patterns made to keep you on the site, annoying algorithms taking you places you never want to go, shitty ai slop, the whole nine yards. But I still like certain channels. As a result I’m doing everything self hosted now - not just YouTube but literally every single piece of digital media I consume. For YouTube I had to create a rotating pool of 5 residential ISP proxies - replaced as soon as YouTube download bot restrictions kick in - and rotated weekly either way.
With this I am able to get all my favorite subs onto my actual hard drive, with some extra awesome features as a result: I vibe coded a little helper app that lets me query the transcript of the video and ask questions about what they say, using cheap haiku queries. I can also get my subs onto my jellyfin server and be able to view it in there on any device. Even comments get downloaded.
All these streamers have gone too far trying to maximize engagement and have broken the social contract, so I see this as totally fair game.
Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md
#29Another trope: longer README.md's than anyone would make, or want.
Yes, to me this is a huge tell. Especially when it goes into detail about pros and cons (using a table) on the most superficial points.
Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md
#30Don't forget "The Ludlum Delusion"- every header in an article or readme reads like a Robert Ludlum novel title, ie "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]".