Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLM Writing Tropes.md

tropes.fyi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 211 posts

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#81

Post by grey-area »

lucumo wrote: post #65
glenstein wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing. That will change over time with training I would hope. At some point I imagine it will be hard to tell.

I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them.

Not sure if we should be hopefully or fearful that they will improve to be undetectable but I suspect they will.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#82

Post by bitwize »

crabmusket wrote: post #51
bitwize wrote: post #9

You know how no one ever wrote their own software and then generative AI came along and suddenly we could have app meals home-cooked by barefoot developers? (The use of such cottagecore terminology for a process that requires being an ongoing client of a hundred-gigabuck, planet-burning megacorporation rubs me in many wrong ways.) If AI finally gets rid of the thing that drove me nuts for years : "leverage" as a verb…

> (The use of such cottagecore terminology for a process that requires being an ongoing client of a hundred-gigabuck, planet-burning megacorporation rubs me in many wrong ways.) I hadn't noticed this - great point. To be fair the "home cooked meal" metaphor comes from 2020, predating genAI coding[1]. But even then, CPUs themselves are so normalised that we just kind of... forget how vertiginously complex the entire s…

At least with personal computers and your own programming skills, you could live off-grid and hack, and be kinda cottagecore, like Paul Lutus or those 100rabbits people. But if you depend on plugging yourself into the sloppotron to do anything, that's many things but self-sufficient isn't one. And self-hosted sloppotrons aren't there yet and require technical skills to set up besides.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#83

Post by grey-area »

tiahura wrote: post #22

Many 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 unambiguo…

They can work well when sparingly used and well thought-out, unfortunately LLM use is more on a par with:

‘It’s not mashed potato. Its potatoes lovingly mixed to perfection with butter and milk which quietly dominate the carrots beside them.’

The words are in the right order, th grammar is ok, but the subject is so banal as to undermine the melodramatic style chosen and they often insert several per paragraph.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#84

Post by grey-area »

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 th style shift has anything to do with training for conversation (ie. tuning models to respond well in a chat situation)?

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#85

Post by lucumo »

grey-area wrote: post #81
lucumo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing. That will change over time with training I would hope. At some point I imagine it will be hard to tell. I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them. Not sure if we should be hopefully or fearf…

> At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing.

And yet people seem to still be terrible at that. Someone uses an em-dash and there's always a moron calling it out as AI.

> I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them.

My personal take is that it doesn't really matter. Most posts are already knee-jerk reactions with little value. Speaking just to be talking. If LLMs make stupid posts, it'll be basically the same as now: scroll a bit more. And if they chance upon saying something interesting then that's a net gain.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#86

Post by sebastiennight »

grey-area wrote: post #81
lucumo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing. That will change over time with training I would hope. At some point I imagine it will be hard to tell. I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them. Not sure if we should be hopefully or fearf…

I wouldn't say it's "bad writing", but rather that the sheer volume of it allows the attentive reader to quickly identify the tropes and get bored of them.

Similar to how you can watch one fantastic western/vampire/zombie/disaster/superhero movie and love it, but once Hollywood has decided that this specific style is what brings in the money, they flood the zone with westerns, or superhero movies or whatever, and then the tropes become obvious and you can't stand watching another one.

If (insert your favorite blogger) had secret access to ChatGPT and was the only person in the world with access to it, you would just assume that it's their writing style now, and be ok with it as long as you liked the content.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#87

Post by astrange »

djoldman wrote: post #20
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…

The RLHF is what creates these anomalies. See delve from kenya and nigeria. Interestingly, because perplexity is the optimization objective, the pretrained models should reflect the least surprising outputs of all.

The newer Claude models constantly use the word "genuinely" because Anthropic seems to have forcibly trained them to claim to be "genuinely uncertain" about anything they don't want it being too certain about, like whether or not it's sentient.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#88

Post by astrange »

red_hare wrote: post #63
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.

OAI puts instructions in the system prompt to use or not use emoji depending on your style settings.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#89

Post by mosselman »

I feel like the audience of the file is more for me the reader rather than the LLM.

> Add this file to your AI assistant's system prompt or context to help it avoid common AI writing patterns.

So if I put this into my LLM's conversation it is like I am instructing it to put this into its AI assistant's system prompt, so the AI assistant's AI assistant.

The alternative is to say:

"Here is a list of common AI tropes for you to avoid"

All tropes are described for me to understand what that AIs do wrong:

> Overuse of "quietly" and similar adverbs to convey subtle importance or understated power.

But this in fact instructs the assistant to start overusing the word 'quietly' rather than stop overusing it.

This is then counteracted a bit with the 'avoid the following...' but this means the file is full of contradictions.

Instead you'd need to say:

"Don't overuse 'quietly', use ... instead"

So while this is a great idea and list, I feel the execution is muddled by the explanation of what it is. I'd separate the presentation to us the user of assistants and the intended consumer, the actual assistants.

I've had claude rewrite it and put it in this gist:

https://gist.github.com/abuisman/05c766310cae4725914cd414639...

Post reply on HN