How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
jola.dev602 points by shintoist 3 days ago
602 points by shintoist 3 days ago
I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of prose and I see those same claudisms.
I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize its an LLM.
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.
Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.
> Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.
The LLMs haven't invented anything. Every LLM-ism is some pre-existing and established word, metaphor, and or stylistic element mechanically overused until it becomes an instant cliche.
The other LLM-ism is vapid bullshit: meaningless crap that's kind of like those old hollywood facades: it appears to be a substantial building, but if you look a bit closer it's just a single wall propped up (https://www.ferrovial.com/blog/en/2018/03/the-fake-architect...).
Sure, that's where the AI got them: the training data. These phrases and cliches were very prevalent especially in corporate "white papers" and memos and marketing materials. There was a time when "stove pipe" was a common one too, along with "silo."
But the LLMs really seem to fixate on using the same ones in the same places all the time. I guess that's because that's the highest probability construction.
Consider each LLM as one personality. We're getting corporate bullshit from a large number of different personalities, so even when they are similar they are still filtered through many different lenses.
Most of us are only dealing with a handful of hyper-productive LLMs, so it makes sense that the LLM-ticks get old much quicker.
Even em dashes have been discouraged by some writers [0] before LLMs because they're easy to overuse.
[0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/05/em-dashes-why-write...
God help me if Claude starts using inline parentheticals, I might just have to take a vow of (online) silence.
All it takes to get accused of being AI nowadays is to remember and use (1) what you were taught about composition in your high school English class, and (2) what you learned from "The Mac is Not a Typewriter" [1].
This is exactly why humans invented the idea of things going in and out of style.
It is one thing to be labelled as "old fashioned" but entirely another to be labelled as an LLM.
what do you mean, which tells are good writing practices?
as I see them they are all truly terrible even if authored by humans
Actually, AI was learning these 'AI-isms' even back in 2017/2018 (probably even earlier). I think a lot of people who just jumped on the imaginary AI bandwagon more recently don't realise the mannerisms AIs are adopting are not really new. At some point the bleed between 'you' or 'you' and AI will just become so transparent it will be obliterated, more likely than not.
What do you mean? AI is being trained on all data available, so obviously it’s being trained on data from 2017/2018 as well.
Or do you mean that the patterns that AI is showing today were already present in communication around that time?
That seems obvious as well, as AI has a lot of repetitive patterns that come from all kinds of periods, of which “load-bearing” is just one.
I believe you and OP are in agreement — they were saying that the 2019 book had them, therefore the terms _do_ predate AI. Your point that AI was being trained on material than is load-bearing (lol) but in agreement with OP, not contradictory.
Only mentioning because your "actually" may imply you thought you were disagreeing, when in fact it's one big happy family!
Claude's affected my language in two ways. one is that, for a long time, Claude in particular responded more to feedback if I swore at it, which caused me to swear at it more. this vicious cycle generalized to the point where I now have to consciously remind myself not to swear when doing something as simple as buying a coffee or asking somebody what time it is. it was difficult to even write that sentence without throwing in an F-bomb just to emphasize the silliness of the problem.
anyway, the other way is I found it's helpful when prompting LLMs to use the same "it's not delivery, it's DiGiorno's" pattern that they're all so obsessed with. especially when the thing's misapprehended some concept, so you need to clarify. this hasn't yet generalized from the fake "conversations" I have with chatbots into my conversational style out in the real world, but the risk is fully there. (it's not an inevitability -- it's an occupational hazard.)
> anyway, the other way is I found it's helpful when prompting LLMs to use the same "it's not delivery, it's DiGiorno's" pattern that they're all so obsessed with. especially when the thing's misapprehended some concept, so you need to clarify
1. Dying laughing at “ it's not delivery, it's DiGiorno's"
2. They do it because it’s succinct, and unambiguous.
It’s not contrived, it’s succinct.
We should be the last community (technical documentation, engineers) complaining about careful planning and precision behind synthesis of textual communication.
Agreed, that was a great line. The whole comment made me wish I could upvote more than once.
It's good to know that Claude knows its place then. By contrast, I have to watch myself with Siri, because calling it the *&^#@$ it is seems to trigger refusal a lot of the time.
I wrote a thank you message on Teams to my coworkers on a project, and half of them thought I had used AI to write it. As a professional writer in a previous life, I was astonished. Then they told me that they had never seen me write anything more than a sentence or two so naturally they assumed something relatively polished had to be AI assisted.
Though I haven’t been a professional writer, I’ve been a good writer with an expansive vocabulary since high school where English was my best subject despite being a STEM maven. I hate the fact that what was previously considered an advantageous skill is now a millstone in public use. I hate having to dumb down and self—censor in order to avoid being accused of using (or being) an LLM. Even though my writing has a few repeated personal tells - certain linguistic errors that I nevertheless employ as part of my idiom (and an LLM never would) - people don’t always notice them. So, I’m forced to change my voice to deal with what’s essentially an IRL Captcha.
Serious question: is the em dash misuse a joke?
Strange. I’d guess that it’s an iOS autocorrect thing as that’s what I was using when I posted that. But I’m trying to reproduce it and can’t.
Seeing as they are, very clearly, just trying to toot their own horn to the beat of the “AI Sucks” drum, I wouldn’t think so.
LLMs are tiring to read, but a self-entitled “[amateur] writer with very good English skills and expansive vocabulary”? Now that’s just exhausting.
I love that in the Spanish cyberspace the tendency is to use more sophisticated and rich vocabulary, and it is common to point out obvious errors. If you understand Spanish, check out pedrititox B-)
When I write these days, I am more aggressive in using "I", so it's clear it's my own voice. Generally, an LLM is less prone to self-reference like that unless it's prompted to, I guess.
I've found they are increasingly doing this in ways that are somewhat creepy. For instance, you might share something, and the AI will say, "One of the things I most frequently notice..." or "What I often feel..."
It used to be that the "you are not an I and you must not pretend to have experiences" training that produced the "As a Large Language model, I don't have experiences like humans do, but..." in replies I remember from the early days of LLM chatbots kept these to the minimum.
But one of the things I most frequently notice is that LLMs increasingly make those claims, about things that are very obviously out of their wheelhouse as far as even theoretical experiences, like pretending to have played a video game.
I was recently a bit annoyed by ChatGPT responding with something like "I can't tell you how many times I've lost small tools in an engine bay" in an apparent attempt to commiserate.
Reprimand it for lying.
What's the fun in the reprimand when you know the target can't really feel it?