[rpdillon]

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.

[cafebeen]

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.

[palmotea]

> 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...).

[SoftTalker]

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.

[vidarh]

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.

[sheept]

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...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

God help me if Claude starts using inline parentheticals, I might just have to take a vow of (online) silence.

[abustamam]

Glad to see I'm not the only one who (perhaps) overuses in-line parentheticals... sometimes to the point where I'd have parentheticals within parentheticals!

[tzs]

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].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201782634

[mohamedkoubaa]

This is exactly why humans invented the idea of things going in and out of style.

[_carbyau_]

It is one thing to be labelled as "old fashioned" but entirely another to be labelled as an LLM.

[nathias]

what do you mean, which tells are good writing practices?

as I see them they are all truly terrible even if authored by humans

[jambalaya8]

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.

[schrodinger]

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!

[stingraycharles]

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.

[jambalaya8]

Yes, I am saying the patterns were emergent already in 2017/2018.

[tessierashpool]

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.)

[DANmode]

> 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.

[JSR_FDED]

It’s not contrived, it’s succinct.

[DANmode]

We should be the last community (technical documentation, engineers) complaining about careful planning and precision behind synthesis of textual communication.

[tempestn]

Agreed, that was a great line. The whole comment made me wish I could upvote more than once.

[xp84]

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.

[greedo]

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.

[phs318u]

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.

[leetrout]

Serious question: is the em dash misuse a joke?

[embedding-shape]

It's a ironic humanizer.

[phs318u]

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.

[leetrout]

Well very apropos :)

[kfjeifjejfj]

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.

[renegade-otter]

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.

[optimalquiet]

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.

[GoatOfAplomb]

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.

[tempestn]

Literally a true statement, I guess.

[andsoitis]

Reprimand it for lying.

[vidarh]

I worked on a fine-tuning projects where the ultimate customer was a major provider, and their style guide at the time required us to fail any response that used "I". I've noticed the same as you, so I guess that is out the window.

[phs318u]

Good advice though too much “I” can sound a little self-centred to my ears.

If/when AGI arrives I assume this tactic will stop working.

[Shorel]

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-)

[kelvinjps10]

There is also a running meme about it, it's funny

[BretonForearm]

Who uses an em dash in "self-censor"?

[phs318u]

I didn’t even notice it util someone above you called it out. I’ve tried to reproduce it and can’t. Don’t even know how to get an em-dash on an iOS keyboard.

EDIT: a long press on the dash key gives you the option of a long dash but I definitely didn’t do that. Or at least, have no conscious memory of doing that.

[embedding-shape]

Not LLMs, probably. Unless prompted for, of course.

[blarg1]

I noticed I'd been doing the "Not X, but Y" thing. Kinda annoying to keep having to stop myself from doing it.

[marbro]

It annoys me, too, that people think only chatbots wrote intelligent prose.

[jghn]

unfortunately load bearing is one of those things that became a claudism but has been part of my daily lexicon for decades. There are a lot of things I say regularly as part of my own vocal quirkiness that now I have to self censor.

[PcChip]

I've used it since that simpsons episode

"it's a load bearing poster..."

[jghn]

I'm pretty sure that's not the source for me but most of my vocal quirks have origin stories like this so it's entirely possible. They're almost always things that I heard which either amused me or I thought sounded cool at the time and just stuck with me.

[crabmusket]

I have a bad habit of doing this with things players have said on Just A Minute and have just lodged in my brain.

[pseudohadamard]

And any petrolhead will be familiar with the phrase "it's structural rust".

[koolba]

Which is a perfectly cromulent usage of the phrase.

[willmarch]

You don’t have to self censor to appease others

[JSR_FDED]

Agree you don’t. But from a purely self-interested perspective, you might want to avoid phrases that to others indicate low effort.

[frumiousirc]

True. Though, I self censor to appease myself as I have caught myself picking up claudisms. I was mortified when I realized that I had started to use "land" as a verb related to finishing some bit of work.

[apparent]

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.

[smcg]

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

[Waterluvian]

Honest take: Claudisms have become a load-bearing part of my vocabulary.

[azalemeth]

If I see the phrase "The honest take: I was wrong" again I will scream...

[worthless-trash]

In my professional life, I've been told that documents I wrote in 2016 sound like they were written by AI. I put significant work into getting my message across clearly and then to have it dismissed was rough.

I no longer put a lot of effort into ensuring documents feel right when writing them.

[klibertp]

It just adds another layer of editing. For me, writing is always a multi-step process, even when many steps are condensed (in quick comments or IMs). First, dump the thoughts quickly in a rough form. Then settle the basic order of points and paragraphs. Fix the grammar. Simplify where needed. Fix the grammar again, then work on wording/phrases/metaphors if needed. Decide the final shape of the text, and do the last correctness pass. Before LLMs, I was done at this point. Now I need to also de-LLM the text before publishing/sending.

The problem is that the word "just" in the first sentence above does a lot of work. You want to get rid of even slightly LLM-adjacent phrases, just to be sure. And you have to do that pass always, for any writing that somebody else can read. It's less of a problem in larger texts, but the "de-LLM-ing tax" is pretty substantial on quick Slack messages. I think the time between typing the last dot and hitting Enter has easily doubled for me over the past 2 years. For now, most of the motivation is still just my care for the written word, but it is increasingly expected as a signal that I'm not letting an LLM write for me. I don't like where this is going, to say the least...

[Grimblewald]

I had a similar experience, only, I was my natural way of talking.

e.g. one pattern I had/have is

<scope problem> the good news is <solution by way of analogy> is aviliable. The <constraint/requirement> is loadbearing though, ...

a near automatic script I rattle off in discussions/consults. When you solve similar problems several times, you figure out what works for communicating things you stick with it and you recycle/polish.

problem is, when for whatever reason, that pattern ends up as part of the core statistical distribution a model uses. You could royally fuck ones life up if working for a "frontier" lab, by simply finding a person with an acceptable speech rythem and cloning it, making it synonymous with ai slop. you'd destroy that persons image every time they open their mouth without them realising it. I for one started randomly getting quite hostile reactions from software devs who would be exposed to more llm putput than others.

Imagine an AI lab steals your voice, and uses it to scam call folks all day. Now, every time you call anyone, you are met with an immediate hangup. you'd have to put on a fake voice just to get the call to stay connected.

I love ai, and what it promises excites me, but as usual, humanity has a way of taking a cool tool and fucking it up royally. maybe the solution is to simply pepper slurs into everything one writes to blacklist ones content from training.

[redwall_hp]

> Imagine an AI lab steals your voice, and uses it to scam call folks all day.

One needn't imagine, because they're already stealing peoples' voices. e.g. the recent HN thread about a professional voice actor that keeps having to prove he's human.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875153

[artemonster]

Its not them. Its you. You are real, this is what matters. /claude

[jeffhuys]

Whenever I’m typing on slack now, I try to dumb down my talking to make it clear it’s not generated. Sucks. Because normally I was always quite eloquent (if I do say so myself)…

[HPsquared]

That's practically a slider that could be added to the settings. Spelling, grammar, structure, word misuse, etc...

[ALLTaken]

There are actual memes about LLM-People. There are people who speak not just in terminology, but also in style of LLMs. You're so adaptive, I would've highly enjoyed and re-enforced the LLM-verbiage. I think it's entertaining! It's socially inept to talk like an LLM, but also it's not common knowledge either since LLMs are new, I believe this will become way more common.

[dspillett]

I've used “load bearing” for decades, though usually when I'm intentionally trying to sound a bit cleverer-than-thou for humour purposes.

I wonder how much other people have used it, for it to be present enough in the pirated data used for training such that Claude uses the words as often as people are seeing,

[renegade-otter]

The one Claudism I will never ever use is "synthesize". I don't even know where that came from - no one talks or writes like that - "I can synthesize that for you".

[malshe]

I use “synthesize” so often! I tell students to analyze published articles and then synthesize the findings. I didn’t know this is now a tell for AI writing

[customguy]

    Fighting hard to catalogue
    Sacrifice for the disguise
    Disconnecting analogues
    Anything to synthesize
    Nothing here is what it seems
    Nothing can be recognized
    Perfect fit for the machine
    Everyone is synthesized

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70KCZxDbgko

[megous]

Never met a chemist did you?

Or a musician, or a philosopher, or a biologist... :D

Such a limited life.

[pseudohadamard]

Exactly. Bots extrude text, they don't synthesize it for you.

[thundoe]

My manager talks like Claude and often goes on for hours, we’re laughing at them so much in private chats day&night

[matthewdgreen]

I love "vibes in a trenchcoat" and I don't care if it makes me sound like an LLM.

[DANmode]

“Now the only coworker who will sit with me at lunch is Claude. Alice, what do I do?”