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LLM Writing Tropes.md

tropes.fyi

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Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#61

Post by iFire »

iFire wrote: post #58
xpe wrote: post #50

> ... But prose? That's from human to human, it's sacred and meant for other people. Using AI for that is deceitful. I understand the sentiment. Meaning I think I understand some of the underlying frustration. But I don't care for the tone or the framing or the depth of analysis (for there isn't much there; I've seen the "if you didn't write it, why should I read it" cliché before *, and it ain't the only argument in…

Agree. I don't write for sentimentality. I write so that my code designs can survive longer than my work on it. No documentation is worse than deceit. The emptiness and vastness of the void (entropy) is much deeper than humans or machines. Google search says this philosphy is called https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/

At the Ise Jingu, the shrine is not built to last; it is built to be reconstructed from scratch every twenty years.

If we want our systems to last, we would need the "process knowledge"—the actual mastery of the craft—to be in human hands rather than decaying in a dead system.

I don't think we can afford to process-knowledge-transfer many of our essential systems... without machine assistance.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#63

Post by red_hare »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #15

I work on research studying LLM writing styles, so I am going to have to steal this. I've seen plenty of lists of LLM style features, but this is the first one I noticed that mentions "tapestry", which we found is GPT-4o's second-most-overused word (after "camaraderie", for some reason).[1] We used a set of grammatical features in our initial style comparisons (like present participles, which GPT-4o loved so much tha…

I wonder if it has to do with how meaning is tied to the tokens. c+amara+derie (using the official gpt-5 tokenizer).

There's also just that weird thing where they're obsessed with emoji which I've always assumed is because they're the only logograms in english and therefore have a lot of weight per byte.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#64

Post by zahlman »

carleverett wrote: post #5

"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…

I would say that the constant attempt to create false profundity (as you call it), itself, is more of a tell than any of the rhetorical constructs used to do it.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#65

Post by lucumo »

glenstein wrote: post #46
malfist wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats the thing about AI writing though. Those tropes are things humans do too. But like once or twice in an article. Not every single freaking paragraph

I also think you can easily get overzealous with it and diagnose increasingly large percentages of ordinary human language as "tropified" due to being part of recognizable cadences. I think most of the things on the list are legit but I think it starts to get to a gray area where it's borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious.

Yes, and it's a detection loop without feedback. You can never verify that a piece of work in the wild is actually AI. The poster is the only one who really knows, and they'll always say it's not.

This is a problem, because you can easily get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop. You feel strengthened in your convictions that you're good at ferreting out LLM-speak because you've found so much of it. And you find so much of it because you feel confident you're good at it. Nobody ever corrects you when you're wrong.

Combine that with general overconfidence and you get threads where every other post with correct grammar gets "called out" as AI generated. It's pretty boring.

There's a similar effect with contentious subject. You get reams and reams of posts calling the other side out for being part of a Russian/Israeli/Iranian/Chinese troll network. There's no independent falsification or verification for that, so people just get strengthened in their existing beliefs.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#66

Post by jimmis »

mapmeld wrote: post #14
nh23423fefe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird to care about a harmless construction along with punctuation.

If you participate in certain online communities where posts used to generally share real ideas and ask real beginner questions, you get tired of it. I am especially tired of seeing "it's not X - it's Y" on /r/MachineLearning posts, claiming that they've found some "geometry" or basic PyTorch code which they think will solve AI hallucinations. And it's becoming clear these people are not just doing this sort of a thi…

Isn't that just the state of every ai-related subreddit at this point?

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#67

Post by freetonik »

ilitirit wrote: post #62

Can someone explain why LLM's write like this when most humans don't?

Most humans don’t, but maybe “most humans” do? As in, on average, as a collective, regressed to the mean of mediocrity and devoid of personality, we write like this? It’s not self-deprecating, it’s humbling.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#68

Post by lucumo »

matusp wrote: post #60

I tried using Gemini for some light historical research. It could not stop using tech metaphors. Lords were the CEOs of their time, pope was the most important influencer, vassal uprisings were job interviews, etc. The metaphors were almost comically useless and imprecise, and Gemini kept using them even when I explicitly asked it to not do that.

I think that's Gemini trying to personalize the answer specifically for you. It really leans heavily into that to the point of being galling.

You can give it additional instructions in the settings, but you have to be careful with that too. I've put my tech stack and code preferences in there to get better code examples. A while later I asked it about binary executable formats and it started ending every answer with "but the JVM and v8 take care of that for you."

Which is both funny in an "I, Robot" kind of way, and irritating. So I told it to ignore my tech stack. I have a master's in CS and can handle a bit of technical detail.

Turns out, Gemini learned sarcasm. Every following answer in that thread got a paragraph that started with something like "But for your master brain, this means..."

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#69

Post by stingraycharles »

glenstein wrote: post #47
joshvm wrote: post #11

No 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.

There are some subreddits where this trope is completely out of control. For better or worse I follow the NBA subreddit and in the comment sections the number of people who throw in honestly as a qualifier is like way more than you would assume from natural conversation.

I really don’t understand what’s wrong with people using LLMs for these types of mundane conversations. There’s nothing to gain and it destroys value of online discourse.
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