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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

#401

Post by kokanee »

phoghed wrote: post #386
ryandrake wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the next generation of AI content produced no recognizable LLM patterns, and was indistinguishable from an actual human author, would you still care and try to determine whether the content was AI produced?

I’ve asked essentially the same question many times to many people, the short answer is “yes” because it’s a matter of ideology not logic for them. I get just as mad about shitty human output as I do about shitty LLM output. The bad thing about LLMs is that they have increased the volume of shit most people have to sift through. When you open a requirements doc and it’s got 13 load bearing em dashes on the first page…

I want to know when I'm consuming AI content because the source of information matters. I want to know what was at stake for the author, what motives they had and didn't have, what biases I should be aware of, and, for example, whether I'm reading content farmed slop that exists solely to attract ad impressions.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#402

Post by seba_dos1 »

ryandrake wrote: post #383
kokanee wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.

If the next generation of AI content produced no recognizable LLM patterns, and was indistinguishable from an actual human author, would you still care and try to determine whether the content was AI produced?

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.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#403

Post by 1attice »

As someone who has been describing things as 'load-bearing' as something like a signature phrase for about twenty years, I'm beyond miffed that Claude has ruined my whole gimmick.

A new catchphrase every twenty years is hardly sustainable at my age :)

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#404

Post by dgunay »

danielvaughn wrote: post #93

It's not that it uses certain phrases, it's that it settles on predictable speech patterns and uses them incessantly. What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating; we just call it a speaking style. But when a machine does it, it drives us crazy. Very interesting psychological phenomenon there.

I'm guilty of this too, but at least my speech tics are mostly a unique blend to me, and they also tend to change seasonally. Meanwhile the emdashpocalypse has been going on for years.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#405

Post by smcg »

apparent wrote: post #399
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.

Stories like this make me want to use each AI at least briefly, so I know what to avoid writing/saying. Or maybe just do a search every couple months to find out what different AIs are known for saying too often.

Or if confronted just say you were using it first, and Claude must have copied you.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#406

Post by Octoth0rpe »

thewebguyd wrote: post #160
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pretty common word if you've worked in anything that vaguely resembles an accountancy system. Also, anything crypto related will often use that word (the distributed ledger, etc)

That's the case for most of these LLM tropes or word choices. They are all common lexicon in their respective fields, but the LLM doesn't make that distinction and uses them everywhere making them standout. No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts. "Load bearing" is from engineering; "Substra…

> No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts.

The reason why I chose that specific term to push on is that practically every SaaS has a ledger _somewhere_ in its stack to keep track of customer payments. I'll give you load bearing and substrate, but ledger IMO should be quite common. Certainly a career devoted to say compiler internals or some specific scientific product could avoid it, but I'd imagine a sizable majority of HN users have worked on some system that accepts online payments for services, necessitating some contact with something likely referred to as a ledger.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#407

Post by solarwindy »

jchw wrote: post #213
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 think it might be even worse. LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns. Maybe it's partly because a pile of weights essentially always starts from scratch in the same condition, but even within a single conversation, it will literally just latch onto words and repeat them incessantly, to the point where it becomes annoying. So for example, current Claude models love "honest". They are always producing…

Heh, one vestigial bit of code, and they all are. Mind you, it's quite a creaky codebase, so it's forgivable to keep finding these appendices and calling them out as such. Useful, even.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#408

Post by 3uler »

kokanee wrote: post #356
bensyverson wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. For whatever reason, Claude likes to talk about the "shape" of "load-bearing" "seams," but if that's the internal jargon it needs to plan and execute its work, who am I to judge? But if I'm reading what is supposed to be someone's original thoughts, it's a huge bummer to see an obvious AI tell. You might say that "it's not just disappointing—it's disrespectful."

Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.

Your tells, are just someone’s good writing now in the training set. It’ll be a moving target with each model.

I use the humanize skill to clean up AI written work before handing it over to colleagues.

https://github.com/blader/humanizer

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#409

Post by recursivecaveat »

wren6991 wrote: post #317
BurningFrog wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't done it, but letting an AI polish a manual first draft might be the best of both worlds?

It tends not to improve things. Besides the generally bland and muddied style, and the low-fidelity reinterpretation of your points, they also have a habit of randomly deleting sentences that didn't spark joy for them but were actually important. I've found them useful to review docs for factual consistency and potential sources of confusion, but the correct workflow from that point is IMO to correct the draft yourse…

When the LLM decides to drive-by rephrase me when making a functional change it drives me up the wall haha.

Woah woah woah human, you can't just say there are "far too many" pipes with similar names to abbreviate their labels, the most I'll allow you is a "large number".

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