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LLM Writing Tropes.md

tropes.fyi

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Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#2
Weirdly, 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

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#4
post #2

Weirdly, 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 believe in the craft.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#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 Claude do it I really liked it. It's amazing how quickly it became the #1 most aggravating thing it does just through sheer overuse. And of course now it's rampant in writing everywhere.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#8

"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…

Weird to care about a harmless construction along with punctuation.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#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 mean roughly "to use"—when no human intervention seems to work, then I shall be over-the-moon happy. I once worked at a place where this particular word was lever—er, used all the damn time and I'd never encountered something so NPC-ish. I felt like I was on The Twilight Zone. I could've told you way back then that you sounded like a bot doing that, now people might actually believe me and thank god.

I will stick by the em dashes however. And I might just start using arrows too. Compose - > → right arrow. Not even difficult.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#10
Wikipedia also has an exhaustive guide, though it's not fun finding tropes you use yourself (I'm very guilty of the false range "from X to Y" thing):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Another one that seems impossible for LLMs to avoid: breaking article into a title and a subtitle, separated by a colon. Even if you explicitly tell it not to, it'll do it.

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