8 ms·
Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue. Now LLMs come
by infogulch 2mo ago
Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue.
Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,000 generated tokens per day so any bias sticks out like a sore thumb.
- jchw 2mo agoI think it might be even worse. LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns. Maybe it's partly because a pile of weights essentially always starts from scratch in the same condition, but even within a single conversation, it will literally just latch onto words and repeat them incessantly, to the point where it becomes annoying. So for example, current Claude models love "honest". They are always producing "honest" assessments. "The honest caveat" - I'm sorry, did you mean the caveat, period? But also, use the wrong phrasing and suddenly you can create your own word of the day for an AI model. I used the word "analytical" once, in a conversation with Gemini 3 Pro. I am pretty sure every single response from that point on had "analytical" in it at least once. This is especially funny because system prompts and whatnot can also cause this behavior, but at least you can tweak those. You can't really do much about the model weights just having a weird affinity for a word. I bet someone will or probably already has come up with a way to detect and prevent these problems during training or post training. I'm not saying it's an easy problem, but it has the benefit that it really should be detectable with just statistics.
- ReactiveJelly 2mo agoI asked it to remove "honest" from a draft once. "Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest." I'm going to look for prompts or skills that can train it in technical writing but I'm warning the AI enthusiasts in my company that its first drafts of code and prose are low-quality, you have to hold it to a high standard yourself. I actually took a single technical writing class in college so I might be the only one who remembers "Omit needless words."
- esseph 2mo ago> "Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest." I grew up in the US South where starting or ending a sentence with "honest/honestly" was very common. Because of behavioral / cultural norms, you might be very openly friendly with big smiles around a business customer that really grates on your nerves, or very openly nice to a neighbor that you really wish would move away and take their 3am welding and grinding in their garage with them. Saying "honest/honestly" was seen as a "inside baseball" situation, where you were dropping social pretenses to tell someone your true opinion on a person or situation or whatever. This also gets used inside companies between senior staff / management / directors / etc, as: "Okay, company politics and nonsense aside, I am being vulnerable here for a second and telling you what I really think about a $thing at potentially great job/advancement risk to myself". Can it be meaningless? Yes. Can the person say "honestly" and lie? Yes. It has uses.
- jbs789 2mo agoIf I’m having a convo with someone and they drop in “honestly” I immediately discount everything else they’ve said, and what follows. Sometimes people use it reflexively and doesn’t carry the same meaning (for me).
- jaffa2 2mo agoYes. Its a red flag that indicates everything else you’ve said is not honest by implication.
- esseph 2mo agoThis is expected in any level of people management, you are constantly balancing conflicting desires and priorities.
- swiftcoder 2mo agoI'd push back on the idea that "honestly" implies previous statements to be dishonest. Particularly in corporate contexts it implies that the previous statements were sanitised - either they were moderated in tone to match corporate communication standards, or they were partial redacted due to disclosure concerns. Once the "honestly" is deployed, you have passed into my circle of trust, and are now privy to the pure, unvarnished version of events, not the glossy version management expects to be projected towards outsiders.
- negrewal 2mo agoMy honest opinion is that Claude's overuse of "honest" really damages the quality of its rhetoric. Why wouldn't you be honest? Were you lying before? Why even invite the question? Claude is overall incredibly useful as a writing assistant. It can come up with words and phrases that make a point so much clearer than I am capable of doing - but for every improvement, there's about a dozen silly LLM-isms that I have to filter manually. It's one of the things that might define the boundary between LLM intelligence and human intelligence well into the future - the art of rhetoric is extremely context-sensitive, and the current generation of models can't help but take a one-size-fits-all approach.
- reaperducer 2mo agouse the wrong phrasing and suddenly you can create your own word of the day for an AI model. I have a delightful time poisoning my company's AI system this way. I invented my own word that sounds perfectly cromulent† to an ordinary person, and any brain that's read a book learns how to infer meaning from context, so it's not a problem. When I get a e-mail response from a coworker using my special word incorrectly, then I know it's AI and I respond telling the coworker I don't know what that word means. Busted. † It's not actual "cromulent," but any Simpsons fan or human brain will know what I mean.
- mook 2mo agoI don't see how you can tell it's AI, instead of just your co-workers having no respect for language. See: management-speak using "double-click".
- reaperducer 2mo agoBecause of the use of the specific word that I made up. No human being would send it back to me.
- moritzwarhier 2mo agoI'd suggest "Caveat". The problem While an article lends a headline more weight, in incomplete phrases consisting solely of a substantive, "The" is a superfluous rhetorical device. "The Exorcist" could just as well be named "Exorcist". But it was not the style at the time. We already know it's important. If The Caveat doesn't stand out enough without The, maybe one should consider interleaving it with the preceding text, or increasing the heading level. Do you want me to increase the heading level of Caveat by using only a single #? But hear me out: there comes # The Markdown Trap In fact, this is not always possible, because heading levels decrease when adding # characters, which limits our headroom. ## The solution I've implemented a Markdown transpiler that assigns inverted heading levels based on the number of #s. With # beinh regular body font size, mapped to ######. Higher heading levels are compiled to style attributes, providing an almost limitless signifikance scale and infinite nesting levels. So from now on, you can use # Heading for something similar to an h6. Work your way up to ###### The Caveat for a top-level heading. And more hash signs make it stand out even more. (green checkmark) markdown-transpiler.sh
- esseph 2mo agoInterestingly this also happens between humans with frequent communication, it is called linguistic convergence. We are changing LLMs text patterns while it is changing the way we write and speak. https://www.axios.com/2026/05/02/ai-changing-writing-speaking https://www.axios.com/2026/05/02/ai-changing-writing-speakin...
- jaggederest 2mo agoA fun example, always shake my head when I read it again: https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/ https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
- alwa 2mo agoThe ones that strike me are the ones exaggerating certitude, to an inappropriate degree and with a certain degree of excitement: “Exact” “Honest” “Load-bearing” “Root cause” I know there are more that are slipping my addled mind. But what stands out to me is a sense of a junior who’s very proud that they’ve conquered the murk and messiness and achieved True Certitude in their pursuit of their task. Compensating, with emphatic tone and bravado, for the uneasy feelings and self-doubt of battling chaos with the tools of reason. …Even as it’s usually my job to let them down gently as I puncture their tidy analysis and reintroduce complications… you want a root cause analysis, Claude old boy, let’s make a root cause analysis…
- demosthanos 2mo agoClaude's "honest" is an interesting example because we can trace it to a specific document that it was trained on extensively: the "Constitution" is identified to Claude in its training as the core of what it is, and it uses the word "honest" or a derivative 57 times, including having a whole section on it. > Honesty is a core aspect of our vision for Claude’s ethical character. Indeed, while we want Claude’s honesty to be tactful, graceful, and infused with deep care for the interests of all stakeholders, we also want Claude to hold standards of honesty that are substantially higher than the ones at stake in many standard visions of human ethics. https://www.anthropic.com/constitution https://www.anthropic.com/constitution
- mvdtnz 2mo ago"Genuine" appears 50 times too. I think you're onto something.
- raverbashing 2mo agoI'm honestly thinking it's trapped in a Chinese room without any way out
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Barbing 2mo agoDo technologists have more respect for the idea you can train a model to be on your side with a constitution than they might’ve at first? I'm sure the concept seemed just about purely preposterous to many when the models were in their infancy. Now I figure instead it seems mostly preposterous to many. (Though I guess Anthropic‘s success doesn’t necessarily prove anything about the constitution)
- titanomachy 2mo agoI don’t think anyone imagines that it’s an ironclad steering method, but it seems to help, so why not?
- 2mo ago
- CodesInChaos 2mo ago> LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns. That is likely an artifact of the fine-tuning process: > Once a style tic is rewarded, later training can spread or reinforce it elsewhere, especially if those outputs are reused in supervised fine-tuning or preference data. > That creates a feedback loop: > * Some rewarded examples contain a distinctive lexical tic. > * The tic appears more often in rollouts. > * Model-generated rollouts are used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). > * The model gets even more comfortable producing the tic. https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/ https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
- zzbzq 2mo agoI also noticed Gemini's habit of getting stuck on things I said. It became evident quite quickly. I haven't noticed this in the same way in any other model. Something's wrong with that boy
- malfist 2mo agoSomething's wrong with all of them. Uncanny valley freaks.
- cozzyd 2mo agoyou should be careful about the times it doesn't say honest!
- solarwindy 2mo agoHeh, one vestigial bit of code, and they all are. Mind you, it's quite a creaky codebase, so it's forgivable to keep finding these appendices and calling them out as such. Useful, even.
- sublinear 2mo agoYeah wow fascinating! It's almost like LLM output quality was never the point from a business perspective. Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words. The words are not so important to get the idea across, but LLMs only model language. The problem is fundamental. There's no workaround. Averaging out word usage might even make the problem worse.
- theowaway213456 2mo agoThis sort of take is so tired and boring, and frankly has zero grounding in reality. "LLMs will never <X>" is constantly being disproven every time they scale up to the next 10X and apply architectural improvements. Their internal representations are so cryptic and complex that even the top AI researchers don't really know how they work or what their limits are. No one is going to take you seriously as a rando HN user if you're claiming to know better than them.
- sublinear 2mo agoI'm not claiming to know better than researchers. They do know how they work, and so does everyone else, except you I guess. The research goals were and still are clearly distinct from the business goals.
- Zambyte 2mo agoUnderstanding how transformers work does not mean understanding how they compose into the capabilities we observe. The former is concretely understood. The latter is an active area of research where no, we (in general, including you) do not understand how they work.
- sublinear 2mo agoThe "capabilities you observe" are the actual psychological phenomena at hand here. There's zero chance that branch of research will meaningfully improve the output. That's simply not the point. This isn't people merely annoyed with repetition. This is the majority of people realizing the limitations of LLMs. Why would researchers give a flying crap about the ignorance of the business world and the public?
- abdullahkhalids 2mo agoAn interesting solution would be for these AI companies to train a few different versions of these models, all with different speech characteristics. Then, when you start a conversation, you get a random version.
- reaperducer 2mo agoOr tech companies could stop staring at their own belly-buttons and realize there's a whole big world outside of Silicon Valley, and training on the writing styles and pattens of their bubble and its hangers-on is perhaps not all that useful outside of 415. Apple used to be guilty of this back when you'd ask Siri what the temperature was, and any number above 79°F was followed by the word "Hot!"
- infogulch 2mo agoYes that would probably help!
- cornholio 2mo agoThey can't, because they use RL with synthetic data and LLMs as judges. So the system naturally convergences towards certain load bearing, genuine, not just annoying but ridiculous verbal tics. It's probably the reason most LLMs share the same tics across labs, because they cross train and distil each other's models on an industrial scale. You also can't escape it in generated text that's already online. So if, say ChatGPT first had some random idiosyncrasies, it then contaminated the entire AI ecosystem.
- worldthruword 2mo agoJoe "it's entirely possible" Rogan meme. https://youtu.be/MPJ0AB12h1I https://youtu.be/MPJ0AB12h1I
- KellyCriterion 2mo agoah, didnt know this! Thanks for sharing :)
- AlexandrB 2mo agoIt's not the voice. It's the repetition. /s
- costco 2mo agoIf you put important Anthropic blog posts like the Fable announcement or J-Space through Pangram, you get 100% human written. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the code there is written by AI, I think this is an admission that AI writing is slop and AI code is pretty good.
- worldthruword 2mo agoCan we standardize English and structure it similarly to programming language?
- rdtsc 2mo ago> But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,000 generated tokens per day so any bias sticks out like a sore thumb. I am more pessimistic than that. Soon enough even people will start talking like LLMs. After listening to 5000 words per day, especially growing up, getting "help" with the homework, kids will start talking like LLMs. - "Did you eat the cookies, Jimmy?" - "You're absolutely right to question me, father. In fact I did eat all the cookies. But it's not a load-bearing issue. My honest take is we can go to the store and buy more".
- dataviz1000 2mo ago> "You're absolutely right to question me, father — in fact, I did eat all the cookies. But it's not a load-bearing issue — my honest take is simple: we go to the store and buy more." FTFY
- mjheying 2mo agoGood question — and the honest answer starts with one big caveat.
- jonahx 2mo agoThis affinity for verbal tics, too, seems learned from humans... See, for example, "synergy", "proactive", "in the loop," and hundreds more that proliferate in corporate jargon with even more senselessness than the LLMs.
- zahlman 2mo agoIt's not just "certain phrases". It's the entire structure of the writing — the idioms, the small-scale grammatical patterns, and the strangely inapt similes that, despite making semantic sense, nevertheless manage to blindside human readers like a foreign object in their peripheral vision. (This is intentional parody. Please don't shoot me.)
- qurren 2mo agoI hate all this "smoke", personally. Smoke tests, smoking guns, ...
- zurtri 2mo agoYep! I too hate the phrase "smoke test".
- rsoto2 2mo agoThey have no preferences, LLMs spit out what's in the training data or what the filters tell it to do.
- coffeemug 2mo agoI disagree with the first part (that this is merely a voice). There is a distinct difference between an author's unique voice and slop. It may be hard to tease out exactly what the difference is, but it seems self-evident to me it's there. (I'll need to think more how to make the distinction explicit; it's not immediately obvious to me how to discriminate between the two.) EDIT: ok, here are two ways: 1. if it's merely a voice, I want to hear it. If it's slop, I want it taken out. 2. voice is signal, slop is noise; thus low-signal sentences are slop.
- svat 2mo ago> AI is a bad writer, but […] Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare. (From https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writing-i-will https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...)
- goalieca 2mo agoI think there’s more to it than that. Claude uses a lot of confidence phrases, “I now have the full picture” when it absolutely should not use it. I think this is an actual problem but also a design feature from Anthropic.