4 ms·
> That 20ms is a smoking gun - it lines up perfectly with the mysterious pattern we saw earlier! Speaking of smoking guns, anybody else reckon Claude overuses
by snowmobile 8mo ago
> That 20ms is a smoking gun - it lines up perfectly with the mysterious pattern we saw earlier!
Speaking of smoking guns, anybody else reckon Claude overuses that term a lot? Seems anytime I give it some debugging question, it'll claim some random thing like a version number or whatever, is a "smoking gun"
- Hikikomori 8mo agoIt's a smoking gun of Claude usage.
- lloydatkinson 8mo agosmoking gun, you're absolutely right, good question, em dash, "it isn't just foo, it's also bar", real honest truth, brutal truth, underscores the issue, delves into, more em dashes, <20 different hr/corporate/cringe phrases>. It's nauseating.
- cubano 8mo agoCome on...haven't we all had to deal with the crazy smart lead who was loaded with those same types of annoying tics? Considering what these LLMs bring to the table, I think a little tolerance for their cringe phrases is in order.
- jcynix 8mo agoIt's what they read on The Internets when training, so don't expect them to generate new phrases, other than what they learned from it?
- Terretta 8mo ago### The answer that fits everything (and what to do about it)
- calvinmorrison 8mo agocant wait for chatgpt to make me read about grandmas secret recipe and scroll through 6 ads to see the ingredients for my chicken teriyaki dinner
- jcynix 8mo agoMaybe we need a real AI which creates new phrases and teaches the poor LLMs? Looking back we already had similar problems, when we had to ask our colleagues, students, whomever "Did you get your proposed solution from the answers part or the questions part of a stackoverflow article?" :-0
- MaxBarraclough 8mo agoThat's the point though, it doesn't reflect human usage of the word. If delve were so commonly used by humans too, we wouldn't be discussing how it's overused by LLMs.
- hamdingers 8mo agoYou might find this a fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- Telemakhos 8mo agoI've love to delve into that. https://pshapira.net/2024/03/31/delving-into-delve/ https://pshapira.net/2024/03/31/delving-into-delve/
- bdamm 8mo agoWithout knowing how LLM's personality tuning works, I'd just hazard a guess that the excitability (tendency to use excided phrases) is turned up. "smoking gun" must be highly rated as a term of excitability. This should apply to other phrases like "outstanding!" or "good find!" "You're right!" etc.
- yread 8mo agoChatGPT too. And "lines up perfectly" when it doesnt actually line up with anything
- dave78 8mo agoSame with Gemini.
- MonkeyClub 8mo agoYou can absolutely see this pattern in Gemini in 2026. Btw, is the injection of "absolutely" and "in $YEAR" prevalent in other LLMs as well, or is it just in Gemini's dialect?
- cristoperb 8mo agoIt's just Gemini. I'm guessing they changes the system prompt for the new year or something, but it's pretty annoying.
- nurettin 8mo agoI've had gemini tell me "We are debugging this problem here in İstanbul" and talking about an istanbul evening, trying to give uplifting or familiar vibes while being creepy. I think there was a setting about time and location which finally got rid of that behavior.
- locallost 8mo agoI chuckled out loud. It's funny cause it's true.
- redwall_hp 8mo ago"You're so right, that nice catch lines up perfectly!"
- smallmancontrov 8mo agoIt's not just a coincidence, it's the emergence of spurious statistical correlations when observations happen across sessions rather than within sessions.
- cipehr 8mo agoI don't think claude has even once used this in my conversations (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Voice conversations...) Sycophancy, yes absolutely! Maybe it has something to do with your profile/memories?
- eieio 8mo agoYes! While this post was written entirely by me, I wouldn't be surprised if I had "smoking gun" ready to go because I spent so much time debugging with Claude last night.
- gf000 8mo agoReminds me of ethimology nerd's videos. He has some content about how LLMs will influence human language.
- grim_io 8mo agoThe "maybe" of yesterday is the "you're absolutely right!" of tomorrow.
- hinkley 8mo agoSome day in the future we will complain about AIs with a 2015 accent because that’s the last training data that wasn’t recursive.
- ranger_danger 8mo agoshouldn't it be "human language influences human language"?
- rubslopes 8mo agoIt's interesting how LLMs influence us, right? The opposite happened to me: I loved using em dashes, but AI ruined it for me.
- andai 8mo agoI still love using emdashes, and people already thought I was a robot! https://xkcd.com/3126/ https://xkcd.com/3126/ Soon the Andy 3000 will finally be a reality...
- pcthrowaway 8mo agoThat's a sweet ass—reference
- jcynix 8mo agoYou might see certain phrases and mdashes ;-) rather often, because … these programs are trained on data written by people (or Microsoft's spelling correction) which overused them in the last n years? So what should these poor LLMs generate instead?
- simonjgreen 8mo agoI see it from GPT5 too a lot
- Fnoord 8mo ago> Speaking of smoking guns Oh shoot! A shooting. So the TL;DR of this post is: don't change this setting unless you know what you're doing.
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo agoChastise it with a reminder that you're using smokeless powder.
- observationist 8mo agoOr the "Eureka! That's not just a smoking gun, it's a classic case of LLMspeak." Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude all have these tics, and even the pro versions will use their signature phrases multiple times in an answer. I have to wonder if it's deliberate, to make detecting AI easier?
- WesolyKubeczek 8mo agoA computational necromancer has likely figured out a way to power a data center by making Archimedes spin in his grave very fast.
- nurettin 8mo agoAt this I'm just so glad that "you're absolutely right!" phase is over.
- layer8 8mo agoYes, it’s kind of a corpus delicti. ;)
- jcims 8mo agoI'm working on a little SRE agent to pre-load tickets with information to help our on-call and I'm already tired of Claude finding 'smoking guns'.
- HPsquared 8mo agoThey love clichés, and hate repeating the same words for something (repetition penalty) so they'll say something like "cause" then it's a "smoking gun" then it's something else