12 ms·
LLM Writing Tropes.md
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088813
- yakattak 7mo agoThey need to add “comprehensive tests” for Claude.
- mvkel 7mo agoWeirdly, 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
- RandomWorker 7mo agoIt'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.
- antinomicus 7mo agoI’ve taken it one step further. YouTube as a front end is awful, and I’ve had enough. Tons of little dark patterns made to keep you on the site, annoying algorithms taking you places you never want to go, shitty ai slop, the whole nine yards. But I still like certain channels. As a result I’m doing everything self hosted now - not just YouTube but literally every single piece of digital media I consume. For YouTube I had to create a rotating pool of 5 residential ISP proxies - replaced as soon as YouTube download bot restrictions kick in - and rotated weekly either way. With this I am able to get all my favorite subs onto my actual hard drive, with some extra awesome features as a result: I vibe coded a little helper app that lets me query the transcript of the video and ask questions about what they say, using cheap haiku queries. I can also get my subs onto my jellyfin server and be able to view it in there on any device. Even comments get downloaded. All these streamers have gone too far trying to maximize engagement and have broken the social contract, so I see this as totally fair game.
- duskwuff 7mo agoIIRC, it's well documented that negative instructions tend to be ineffective - possibly through some sort of LLM analogue to the "pink elephant paradox", or simply because the language models are unable to recognize clichés until they've already been generated.
- esperent 7mo agoThat was definitely true with early LLMs but I don't know if that's still the case. Certainly not as strong as it used to be. I think now most negative instructions are followed quite well but there's still a few things that must be deeply embedded from pretaining that are harder to avoid - these specific annoying phrasings, for example.
- orbital-decay 7mo agoBoth pink elephant effect and accuracy drop on negative instructions are pretty fundamental biases for both humans and LLMs. It impossible to get rid of them entirely, only mitigate them to an acceptable degree. Empirically, the only way to make a model reliable at harder negative instructions is CoT, especially a self-reflection type CoT (write a reply, verify its correctness, output a fixed version). If the native CoT fails to notice the thing that needs to be verified and you don't have the custom one or a verification loop, you're out of luck.
- oliver_dr 7mo ago[dead]
- esperent 7mo agoI assume it'll work more as a review pass rather than expecting good results outright. For all kinds of things like this where I feel like I'm fighting the LLM, doing the initial work then auditing it seems to be the best approach (the other one is writing all kinds of tests, LLMs including Opus 4.6 love to fudge tests just as much as they love telling you how insightful you are).
- cainxinth 7mo agoIt amounts to telling it: “Stop doing that thing you can’t stop doing.”
- ptak_dev 7mo ago[flagged]
- mvkel 7mo ago> The model isn't wrong — it's just optimizing for the wrong signal. sniff sniff I feel like I'm going insane.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- carleverett 7mo ago"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.
- nh23423fefe 7mo agoWeird to care about a harmless construction along with punctuation.
- scuppernong 7mo agoweirder still to immerse your brain in sewage and take pride in your lack of discernment.
- mapmeld 7mo agoIf you participate in certain online communities where posts used to generally share real ideas and ask real beginner questions, you get tired of it. I am especially tired of seeing "it's not X - it's Y" on /r/MachineLearning posts, claiming that they've found some "geometry" or basic PyTorch code which they think will solve AI hallucinations. And it's becoming clear these people are not just doing this sort of a thing on a whim, but spending days in delusional conversations with the AI.
- jimmis 7mo agoIsn't that just the state of every ai-related subreddit at this point?
- andrew_lettuce 7mo agoConstruction paired with punctuation is literally the entire point of written communication.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoThis kills the headline baiting tech blogger.
- CharlesW 7mo agoA substantive human-written resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- bitwize 7mo agoYou 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.
- crabmusket 7mo ago> (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.) I hadn't noticed this - great point. To be fair the "home cooked meal" metaphor comes from 2020, predating genAI coding[1]. But even then, CPUs themselves are so normalised that we just kind of... forget how vertiginously complex the entire supply chain is. [1] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
- bitwize 7mo agoAt least with personal computers and your own programming skills, you could live off-grid and hack, and be kinda cottagecore, like Paul Lutus or those 100rabbits people. But if you depend on plugging yourself into the sloppotron to do anything, that's many things but self-sufficient isn't one. And self-hosted sloppotrons aren't there yet and require technical skills to set up besides.
- Terretta 7mo ago> now people might actually believe me “Leverage” feeling “impacted” much?
- Jordan-117 7mo agoWikipedia 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 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.
- malfist 7mo agoThats the thing about AI writing though. Those tropes are things humans do too. But like once or twice in an article. Not every single freaking paragraph
- glenstein 7mo agoI also think you can easily get overzealous with it and diagnose increasingly large percentages of ordinary human language as "tropified" due to being part of recognizable cadences. I think most of the things on the list are legit but I think it starts to get to a gray area where it's borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious.
- lucumo 7mo agoYes, and it's a detection loop without feedback. You can never verify that a piece of work in the wild is actually AI. The poster is the only one who really knows, and they'll always say it's not. This is a problem, because you can easily get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop. You feel strengthened in your convictions that you're good at ferreting out LLM-speak because you've found so much of it. And you find so much of it because you feel confident you're good at it. Nobody ever corrects you when you're wrong. Combine that with general overconfidence and you get threads where every other post with correct grammar gets "called out" as AI generated. It's pretty boring. There's a similar effect with contentious subject. You get reams and reams of posts calling the other side out for being part of a Russian/Israeli/Iranian/Chinese troll network. There's no independent falsification or verification for that, so people just get strengthened in their existing beliefs.
- joshvm 7mo agoNo mention of Claude/ChatGPT's favourite new word genuine and friends? They also like using real and honest when giving advice. Far as I can tell this is a new-ish change. > Honestly? We should address X first. It's a genuine issue and we've found a real bug here. Honorable mention: "no <thing you told me not to do>". I guess this helps reassure adherence to the prompt? I see that one all the time in vibe coded PRs.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- pinum 7mo agoSimilarly, "X that actually works"
- glenstein 7mo agoThere are some subreddits where this trope is completely out of control. For better or worse I follow the NBA subreddit and in the comment sections the number of people who throw in honestly as a qualifier is like way more than you would assume from natural conversation.
- stingraycharles 7mo agoI really don’t understand what’s wrong with people using LLMs for these types of mundane conversations. There’s nothing to gain and it destroys value of online discourse.
- capnrefsmmat 7mo agoI work on research studying LLM writing styles, so I am going to have to steal this. I've seen plenty of lists of LLM style features, but this is the first one I noticed that mentions "tapestry", which we found is GPT-4o's second-most-overused word (after "camaraderie", for some reason).[1] We used a set of grammatical features in our initial style comparisons (like present participles, which GPT-4o loved so much that they were a pretty accurate classifier on their own), but it shouldn't be too hard to pattern-match some of these other features and quantify them. If anyone who works on LLMs is reading, a question: When we've tried base models (no instruction tuning/RLHF, just text completion), they show far fewer stylistic anomalies like this. So it's not that the training data is weird. It's something in instruction-tuning that's doing it. Do you ask the human raters to evaluate style? Is there a rubric? Why is the instruction tuning pushing such a noticeable style shift? [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2422455122 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2422455122, preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107. Working on extending this to more recent models and other grammatical features now
- networked 7mo agoYou may be interested in my links on AI's writing style: https://dbohdan.com/ai-writing-style https://dbohdan.com/ai-writing-style. I've just added your preprint and tropes.fyi. It has "hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of 'creative writing' LLMs" by nostalgebraist (https://www.tumblr.com/nostalgebraist/778041178124926976/hydrogen-jukeboxes https://www.tumblr.com/nostalgebraist/778041178124926976/hyd...), which features an example with "tapestry". > Why is the instruction tuning pushing such a noticeable style shift? Gwern Branwen has been covering this: https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-learning/mode-collapse/index https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-lear....
- capnrefsmmat 7mo agoThanks for the links. You may be interested in the other LLM writing style studies I've been collecting: https://www.refsmmat.com/notebooks/llm-style.html https://www.refsmmat.com/notebooks/llm-style.html
- FartyMcFarter 7mo agoThe article has been slashdotted so I don't know if this one is in there but: One I've seen Gemini using a lot is the "I'll shoot straight with you" preamble (or similar phrasing), when it's about to tell me it can't answer the question.
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoWhat we really need is a browser plugin underlining these patterns, especially for comments.
- charlieflowers 7mo agoThis list reads like, "AIs are not your typical braindead person on the street. They actually use a decent but not crazily advanced vocabulary." I mean, "tapestry" is a great word for something that is interconnected. Why not use it?
- twoodfin 7mo agoSomething that’s only peripherally interconnected is not a tapestry, but an LLM falling victim to these tropes will describe it as such for “punch”. Not just style with the absence of substance, but misleading substance.
- tiahura 7mo agoMany of these are standard fare in legal writing. Negative parallelism is a staple of briefs. "This case is not about free speech. It is about fraud." It does real work when you're contesting the other side's framing. Tricolons and anaphora are used as persuasion techniques for closing arguments and appellate briefs. Short punchy fragments help in persuasive briefs where judges are skimming. "The statute is unambiguous." As with the em dash - let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
- grey-area 7mo agoThey can work well when sparingly used and well thought-out, unfortunately LLM use is more on a par with: ‘It’s not mashed potato. Its potatoes lovingly mixed to perfection with butter and milk which quietly dominate the carrots beside them.’ The words are in the right order, th grammar is ok, but the subject is so banal as to undermine the melodramatic style chosen and they often insert several per paragraph.
- runako 7mo agoI can't believe people are still using the em dash as a flag. Packages like MS Word have converted hyphens to em dashes for over a decade without the user even trying to do so. Honestly, the easiest way to verify if a person wrote something is to look for apostrophe use.
- bryanrasmussen 7mo agoThis makes me think of the attractiveness of overly bad writing to writers, as a challenge, the most obvious example being the bulwer-lytton award, or the instinctive ignoring of instructions from fiction magazines that might say "we don't want any stories about murderous grandparents, French bashing, bestiality, bank robbers from the future, or kind-hearted Nazis - and especially do not try to be super brilliant and funny and send us your story about kind-hearted Nazi bank-robbing french-bashing grandparents that like killing people and having sexy fun times with barnyard animals! Because every original thinker like you thinks they are the first to have come up with that idea!" and then as a writer you feel challenged to do exactly what they say they don't want because what a glorious triumph if you manage to outdo everyone and get your dreck published because it's dreck that is so bad it's good! It does not seem like there are lots of people who are perversely inclined to write a story with all these tropes and words in it, but surely there must be some, because if you make something that beats the LLM (by being creatively good) using all the crap the LLM uses, it would seem some sort of John Henry triumph (discounting the final end of John Henry of course, which is a real downer)
- agnishom 7mo ago> (let's play cat and mouse!). No thanks, I hate this large scale social experiment
- netsec_burn 7mo agoAnother trope: longer README.md's than anyone would make, or want.
- NewsaHackO 7mo agoYes, to me this is a huge tell. Especially when it goes into detail about pros and cons (using a table) on the most superficial points.
- verdverm 7mo agoand all those emoji... sometimes to the point they are on most lines and commit messages.
- roywiggins 7mo agoDon't forget "The Ludlum Delusion"- every header in an article or readme reads like a Robert Ludlum novel title, ie "The [Noun:0.9|Adjective:0.1] [Noun]".
- bryanrasmussen 7mo agoI sort of think the whole middlebrow angst thread about Bourdieu going on right now applies to LLM writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260028
- xgulfie 7mo agoIf only we could fix how it writes like garbage
- awakeasleep 7mo agoIf this bugs you, open chatGPT personality settings, choose “efficient” base style, and turn off the enthusiasm and warmth sliders It makes a tremendous difference. Almost everything on this list is the emotional fluff ChatGPT injects to simulate a personality.
- esperent 7mo ago[flagged]
- layer8 7mo agoAs the article points out at the end, these aren't bad per se. The issue is that LLMs overuse them, and we're all getting the same(-ish) LLM. It's not so different from how people sometimes have their idiosyncratic phrasings they use all the time.
- layer8 7mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20260307224900/https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md https://web.archive.org/web/20260307224900/https://tropes.fy...
- veqq 7mo agoTrope -> Snowclone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- oooyay 7mo agoInterestingly, one of the claimed references is a broken link: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/ai_writing_semantic_ablation/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/ai_writing_semantic_a.... It's actually: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_....
- xpe 7mo ago> ... But prose? That's from human to human, it's sacred and meant for other people. Using AI for that is deceitful. I understand the sentiment. Meaning I think I understand some of the underlying frustration. But I don't care for the tone or the framing or the depth of analysis (for there isn't much there; I've seen the "if you didn't write it, why should I read it" cliché before *, and it ain't the only argument in town). Now for my detailed responses: 1. In the same way the author wants people to respect other people, I want the author to respect the complexity of the universe. I'm not seeing that. 2. If someone says "I wrote this without any LLM assistance" but do so anyway, THAT is clearly deceptive. 3. If you read a page that was created with LLM assistance, it isn't reasonable for you to say the creator was being deceptive just because you assumed. It takes two to achieve deception: both the sender and the receiver. 4. If you read a page on the internet, it is increasingly likely there was no human in the loop for the article at all. Good luck tracing the provenance of who made the call to make it happen. It might well be downstream of someone's job. (Yes, we can talk about diffusion of responsibility, etc., that's fair game -- but if you want to get into the realm of moral judgments, this isn't going to be a quick and tidy conversation) 5. I think the above comment puts too much of a "oh the halcyon days!" spin on this. Throughout history, many humans, much of the time, are largely repackaging things we had heard before. Unfortunately (or just "in reality") more of us are catching on to just how memetically-driven people are. We are both individuals and cogs. It is an uncomfortable truth. That brainwashed uncle you have is almost certainly a less reliable source of information than Claude. 6. The web has crappy incentives. It sucks. Yes, I want people to behave better. That would be nice, but I can't realistically expect people to behave better on the web unless there are incentives and consequences that align with what I want. The Web is a dumpster fire, not because of bad individuals, but because of system dynamics. Incentives. Feedback. 7. If people communicate more clearly, with fewer errors, that's at least a narrow win. One has to at least factor this in. 8. People accusing other people of being LLMs has a cost. Especially when people do it overconfidently or in a crude or mean manner. I've been on the receiving end. Why? Because I write in a way that sometimes triggers people because it resembles how LLMs write. * I want to read high quality things. I actually care less if you wrote it as bullet points, with the help of an LLM, on a napkin, on a posterboard ... my goal is to learn from something suited to some purpose. I'm happy reading a computer-generated chart. I don't need a human to do that by hand. The previous paragraph attempts to gesture at some of the conceptual holes in the common arguments behind "if you want a human to read it, a human should right it": they aren't systematically nor rigorously "wargamed" or "thought-experimented"; they are mostly just "knee-jerked". I am quite interested in many things, including: (1) connecting with real people; (2) connecting with real people that don't merely regurgitate an information source they just ingested; (3) having an intelligent process generating the things I read. As an example of the third, I want "intelligent" organizations that synthesize contributions from their constituent parts. I want "intelligent" algorithms to help me focus on what matters to me. &c. If a machine does that well, I'm not intrinsically bothered. If a human collaborates with an LLM to do that, fine. Whatever. We have bigger problems! Much bigger ones. Yes, I want to live in a world where humans are valued for what they write and their intrinsic qualities, even as machines encroach on what used to be our biggest differentiator: intelligence itself. But wanting this and morally shaming people for not doing it doesn't seem like a good way to actually make it happen. Getting to that world, to my eye, requires public sense-making, grappling with the reality of how the world works, forming coalitions, organizing society, and passing laws. Yes, I understand that HN has a policy that people write their own stuff, and I do. (See #8 above as well as my about page.) Thank you to the approximately zero or maybe one person who made it this far. I owe you a beer. You can easily find me. I'm serious. But then we have to find a way to have a discussion while enjoying a beer on a video call. Alas. I expect better from people -- and unfortunately a lot of people's output is lower quality than what I get from Claude. THIS is what pisses me off: that a machine-curated output is actually more useful to me than a vast majority of what people say, at least when I have particular questions to ask. This is one or many uncomfortable realities I would like people need to not flinch away from. As far as intelligent output is concerned, humans are losing a lot of ground. And fast. Don't shoot the messenger. If you don't recognize this, you might have a rather myopic view of intelligence that somehow assumes it must be biological or you just keep moving the goalposts. Or that somehow (but how?) humans "have it" but machines can't.
- newAccount2025 7mo agoGreat list. Invented Concept Labels is the one I think I get most frustrated by. When exploring new areas, I’ll read its paragraphs of acronyms and weird words and think I just don’t know some term of art, and as soon as I ask for a definition it’s like, “I just made that up, that’s not a formal term, blah blah blah.”
- lorenzk 7mo agoThis changes everything.
- matusp 7mo agoI tried using Gemini for some light historical research. It could not stop using tech metaphors. Lords were the CEOs of their time, pope was the most important influencer, vassal uprisings were job interviews, etc. The metaphors were almost comically useless and imprecise, and Gemini kept using them even when I explicitly asked it to not do that.
- lucumo 7mo agoI think that's Gemini trying to personalize the answer specifically for you. It really leans heavily into that to the point of being galling. You can give it additional instructions in the settings, but you have to be careful with that too. I've put my tech stack and code preferences in there to get better code examples. A while later I asked it about binary executable formats and it started ending every answer with "but the JVM and v8 take care of that for you." Which is both funny in an "I, Robot" kind of way, and irritating. So I told it to ignore my tech stack. I have a master's in CS and can handle a bit of technical detail. Turns out, Gemini learned sarcasm. Every following answer in that thread got a paragraph that started with something like "But for your master brain, this means..."
- Kye 7mo agoThe new memory feature in Gemini got turned on by default and every answer came out like this. It kept working in details from one particularly long thread. Everything was framed in terms of the common elements. Everything. I turned it off immediately.
- jval43 7mo agoHow can you turn it off without turning off history ("My Activity") altogether? I noticed the "memory" too and it's turned Gemini into a useless syncophant for me, but so subtle that I almost didn't spot it.
- Kye 7mo agohttps://gemini.google.com/saved-info https://gemini.google.com/saved-info The toggle by "Your past chats with Gemini"
- ilitirit 7mo agoCan someone explain why LLM's write like this when most humans don't?
- freetonik 7mo agoMost humans don’t, but maybe “most humans” do? As in, on average, as a collective, regressed to the mean of mediocrity and devoid of personality, we write like this? It’s not self-deprecating, it’s humbling.
- dtf 7mo agoI suppose it might be because humans that use LLMs write like this.
- MDWolinski 7mo agoI asked ChatGPT about that and it gave a nicely reasoned explanation on what AI produces compared to humans. But that being said, the problem I think is that people treat the output from LLMs as final. It should be treated more as idea generation or early draft to get over the “staring at a blank page” and get the creative juices flowing and creating your own content. Having purely AI generated content and eventually feeding the algorithms and soon enough every sounds the same (already does in a lot of places).
- twoodfin 7mo agoWriting like this (say a technical blogpost) is supposed to communicate ideas effectively. Rhetoric, vocabulary, metaphors all aid this communication in good writing. But the prompt is usually bereft of fully fleshed out ideas, so the LLM substitutes style in a futile attempt to amplify the signal. Though maybe it’s not futile! HN voters eat this stuff up daily.
- stratos123 7mo agoBase models don't write like that. This appears during RLHF. It's not totally clear why*, but probably a large part of the answer is that this style looks great to human reviewers, and only starts looking terrible once you get to play around with the released model and realise it talks like that all the time. * The technical term is "mode collapse", see [1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_collapse [2] https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-learning/mode-collapse/index* https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-lear...
- jeff_antseed 7mo ago[dead]
- cubefox 7mo agoAnother popular one is ending headlines with a remark/alternative in parentheses. Especially "(why this matters)". More generally, it's interesting that many different LLMs have differences in their favorite tropes but converge on broadly similar patterns. Of course ChatGPT and its default persona (you can choose others in the settings, but most people don't do that) is overrepresented in these examples. For example, the article doesn't mention the casual/based tone of Grok that often feels somewhat forced.
- nprateem 7mo agoWhat do people expect? You use an LLM, don't tell it your preferred writing style and get annoyed when it falls back to defaults. All those tropes have their place in certain contexts. AI overusing them is because they have no memory across all they've written. Each conversion is a new chat so it's like "I haven't used delve in a while, think I'll roll out that bad boy" And then you try to fix this by telling it what not to do which doesn't work very well, so...
- FiniteIntegral 7mo agoA subtle tell for generated text is just how damn flat it is to read. Not that technical documentation require some form of grand prose, but how unspecific the text can truly get. Reading a high school persuasive essay can have more detail, and those are often just written for a grade. I can understand someone needing help with writing but getting an agent to do the job for you feels like a personal defeat.
- BoredomIsFun 7mo ago[flagged]
- andelink 7mo agoGreat example of parent comments point.
- BoredomIsFun 7mo agoNo not really. It is an excellent rebuttal. It is funny and witty, compared to the sour GP comment.
- hananova 7mo agoIt’s not excellent anything, except perhaps excellent LLM slop. Cut it out.
- BoredomIsFun 7mo ago[flagged]
- theturtle32 7mo agoHonestly, you need a tailored one of these for each of the major LLM model/version pairs. Claude and Gemini don't exhibit all of the same tropes in the same severities as OpenAI's GPT series, and within each of those, each revision sometimes exhibits substantial variance from the stylistic propensities of its immediate predecessor.
- mosselman 7mo agoI feel like the audience of the file is more for me the reader rather than the LLM. > Add this file to your AI assistant's system prompt or context to help it avoid common AI writing patterns. So if I put this into my LLM's conversation it is like I am instructing it to put this into its AI assistant's system prompt, so the AI assistant's AI assistant. The alternative is to say: "Here is a list of common AI tropes for you to avoid" All tropes are described for me to understand what that AIs do wrong: > Overuse of "quietly" and similar adverbs to convey subtle importance or understated power. But this in fact instructs the assistant to start overusing the word 'quietly' rather than stop overusing it. This is then counteracted a bit with the 'avoid the following...' but this means the file is full of contradictions. Instead you'd need to say: "Don't overuse 'quietly', use ... instead" So while this is a great idea and list, I feel the execution is muddled by the explanation of what it is. I'd separate the presentation to us the user of assistants and the intended consumer, the actual assistants. I've had claude rewrite it and put it in this gist: https://gist.github.com/abuisman/05c766310cae4725914cd414639f3780 https://gist.github.com/abuisman/05c766310cae4725914cd414639...
- nimonian 7mo agoI completely agree. This is a good list, but a poor prompt. Also, I sometimes find a sort of Streisand effect: when you tell the LLM to avoid something is starts doing it more. Like, if you say "don't use delve" it contains the words "use delve" which, amongst a larger context, seems to get picked up. I have more success telling the LLM to write in the style of a particular author I like. It seems to activate different linguistic patterns and feel less generic. Then, I make an "editor agent" comb through, looking for tropes and rewording them. Their sole focus is eliminating the tropes, which seems to work better.
- Terretta 7mo agoThe source doc and the gist name dozens of specific bad patterns by label (“Negative Parallelism,” “Gerund Fragment Litany,” etc.) and repeat examples of them. An LLM guide would do better to avoid every one of those labels and examples, since the whole point is not to prime the pattern. Instead each instruction should describe the positive shape of good writing – what a well-constructed sentence, paragraph, or piece actually looks like. Following this line, here is Claude rewriting OP: https://gist.github.com/abuisman/05c766310cae4725914cd414639f3780?permalink_comment_id=6018966#gistcomment-6018966 https://gist.github.com/abuisman/05c766310cae4725914cd414639... // This post’s typography and Oxford commas by human hands.
- jamesmstone 7mo agoBut please tell me "Why it matters" - LLMs seem to love adding this
- Terretta 7mo ago## Why it matters (and when it doesn't)
- adrianh 7mo agoThis contains a lot of advice about good writing in general. Ironically I’d recommend it to humans as well as AIs.
- Terretta 7mo agoParticularly to LinkedInfluencers.
- villgax 7mo agoThis has sparked a discussion
- twoodfin 7mo agoGreat list. The one that grates most for me not on this list is aggressive use of first-person-plural and second-person perspective: “We’ve all been there.” “Your first instinct might be…” “Now you have a…”
- Terretta 7mo agoChatGPT 5.2+ has gotten aggressive about attributing its errors to its interlocutors. User: "This code gave this error." GPT: "That's because you did X wrong. Do Y." User: "You gave me X. And Y is wrong." GPT: "Honestly, that's great feedback on X. Your Y is broken because Z."
- irenetusuq 7mo ago[dead]
- samrus 7mo agoIts so sad that perfectly fine patterns of writing are now associated with slop. Just because corporate greed couldnt stop themselves from making a bubble they then had to shove down our throats to prevent popping
- erelong 7mo agoalternatively: "a guide for humans on to how to sound like LLMs"
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- adonovan 7mo agoOne annoying trope I keep seeing in Gemini output is the punchy invented concept name in a tripartite list: - “The Pledge”:… - “The Turn”:… - “The Prestige”:… (For this particular example I used real terms from the stage magic world, at least according to Christopher Nolan’s film, as it captures the same meaningless-to-the-uninitiated quality.)
- pmg101 7mo agoSometimes the elements in the `Avoid patterns like:` list are quoted text it should avoid, sometimes they're just descriptions of things to avoid. But they are "quoted" in both cases which is a bit confusing. Maybe not to an AI though.
- dang 7mo agoLooks like this was a Show HN that didn't get much attention: Show HN: Tropes.fyi – Name and shame AI writing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088813 - Feb 2026 (3 comments) I hope ossa-ma sees this second round!
- oliver_dr 7mo ago[dead]
- woah 7mo agoReading through this i feel like i'm on substack
- sim04ful 7mo agoThis seems like it would have adversarial consequences. Wouldn't these list of tropes get longer over the years.
- Planktonne 7mo agoI find this repellent; why not, instead of trying to push unwelcome generated prose below the radar, stop trying to waste everyone's time? People don't object to these patterns because they hate lists of three; they object to them in this context because of what they signal about the content. If using AI to write is nothing to be ashamed of, then you shouldn't feel the need to hide it. If it is something to be ashamed of, then you should stop doing it. If someone objects to you poisoning a well, the correct response is not to use a more subtle poison.
- mobrienv 7mo agoTreating the act of refining text as a confession of shame misses the point of how writing works. Whether a draft begins as a model output, a dictation, or a scribbled note, the final responsibility belongs to the person who hits publish. Improving prose to remove predictable patterns is the work of an editor. This process ensures the content is worth reading and respects the audience's time. Comparing a software tool to "poisoning a well" turns a debate over style into a moral crisis that doesn’t fit the situation. If the information is accurate and the writing is clear, the water in the well is fine, regardless of the pump used to get it there. If the water tastes good, complaining about the plumbing is just a distraction.
- jazzyjackson 7mo agoParents complaint is explicitly not about the style of the prose, use whatever you want to check your grammar and reduce redundancy. The complaint of poisoning the well is regarding content that is not intended to express anything at all, the old “why would I read what nobody bothered to write”
- mobrienv 7mo agoThe issue is that you're conflating the process of transcription with the act of expression. If I feed an LLM my own raw research notes and technical observations and use it to help structure those thoughts into a readable essay, I haven't "avoided writing". The "why would I read what nobody bothered to write" argument only applies to people who ask a bot to hallucinate an opinion from scratch. It doesn't apply to authors using the tool to clarify their own ideas.
- hexasquid 7mo agoCan we do this for everyone? It's a bold strategy cotton. Bold of you to say that. Wild how mundane things get call wild. Thay're making calling things wild their entire personality. In that case, by your logic, (least generous misrepresentation of your logic).
- dwaltrip 7mo agoAI writing sucks because it doesn't have a voice. It's not trying to say anything. Human writers are interesting because they offer a unique perspective from their lived experience. It also struggles to maintain deep coherence. This is all probably related. It might be very hard or impossible to have deep coherence without human-like goals, memory, or sense of self.
- winwang 7mo agoI don't think lived experience matters too much to me. In some sense, AI has very unique "lived" experience, which is what creates the voice it uses ("doesn't have a voice" seems like an impossibility to me by definition). I find AI very "human-esque", and its "self-reported" phenomenology is very entertaining to me, at least. I also think AI writing might feel trashy also because most human writing is trashy.
- TheSamFischer 7mo ago[dead]
- lokar 7mo agoThe LLM “voice” is the average of Reddit, and is therefore irredeemable.
- winwang 7mo agoYeah that's somewhat close to what I meant, though there's an irony here in that your comment (and this one) are pretty reddit-esque.
- firefoxd 7mo agoIf you are serious about sharing written ideas, I suggest you avoid using this type of prompts at all cost. I've worked with LLMs to write on my blog and they are pretty good at first glance [0]. But do it a few time and you'll notice that those tropes are the least of your problems. Not only all your articles will sound the same, but you'll see that same voice on other blogs, news articles, white paper, etc. It's as if they were all written by Mo Samuels. Readers are often here for the author's voice, not just the content of the text. I often hear this here: "if you don't bother writing, why should I bother reading?" In fact, save us some time and just share the prompt. [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/why-we-hate-llm-articles https://idiallo.com/blog/why-we-hate-llm-articles
- Lerc 7mo agoI have seen people suggest that the problem is that LLMs let you express any of your ideas, but the number of people with ideas worth expressing is limited. In a sense I think this is accurate, but not inevitable. I think there is a lack of creative thinking, but it has come from a world that doesn't value it and suppresses difference. There is a brilliant line in Treehouse of Horrors IV where Principle Skinner says "Now I've gotten word that a child is using his imagination, and I've come to put a stop to it." Which is just the perfect comment on the modern education system. Models trained on the lack of diversity will push one way, but I think it will also avenues for expression that didnb't exist before. The balance will come from how we react and support what we would like to have happen
- jug 7mo agoI think it has more to do with LLM's being statistical models than human creativity lacking in the input. The creativity and millions of voices and tones may be there, but since these models tend to go for the most likely next words, polishing this away becomes a feature. A text by a human mind may be seen as a jagged crystal with rough edges and character. Maybe not perfectly written but it's special. An LLM takes a million of crystals and trims the most likely tokens to be chosen into what would rather appear as a smooth pebble; the common core of all crystals. And everyone using the LLM will get very similar pebbles because to the LLM, regardless who is speaking to it, it will provide the same most likely next tokens. It's not that creativity is lacking in the input, but the LLM picks the most commonly chosen words by all humans in given contexts. For that to sound imaginative and great as you go, it would have to not only exist in the data, but be a common dominating voice among humans. But if it was, it wouldn't be seen as creative because it would be the new normal. So I'm not sure how there's a good way out of this. You could push LLM temperature high so that it becomes more "creative" by picking less popular tokens as it writes, but this instead tend to make it unpredictable and picking words it shouldn't have. I mean, we are still dealing with statistical models here rather than brains and it's a rough tool for that job.
- runako 7mo agoThese things are always so misguided, and this was no exception. The only way to have a piece of writing not flagged as AI is to write poorly. Ignore grammar, misspell words, etc. Don't follow basic guidance on composition. Generally write in such a way that you would merit no better than a C on a high school writing task. I'll give some examples. Some will be from this list of "AI writing tropes" and some will be from prominent human-written (prior to 2020) sources. Guess which is which (answer at the bottom). - "Let's explore this idea further." - "workload creep" - "Navigating the complex landscape of " - "Let's delve into the details" And I'm not going to get into how silly this is as a so-called LLM trope: "Every bullet point or list item starts with a bolded phrase or sentence." I remember reading paperbacks published before the first PC that used this style. Fractal summaries is literally how composition is taught to students. Avoiding that style will make the writing more likely to sound less like a person wrote it. I would suggest the author upgrade this to a modern version of Strunk & White and go on a mission to sell that. Call it Anti-Corpspeak or whatever. But don't pretend that these formulations only arrived in bulk in the last 2-3 years. ANSWER KEY: these are all obviously prominent in text published before LLMs hit, as well as in the tropes doc. They are no more signs of LLM-generated text than is the practice of using nouns, verbs, and adjectives to convey ideas.
- RevEng 7mo agoExactly this! Many times I read an article that someone says is "obviously AI" and lists several tell tale signs, but these are patterns I also follow in my own writing. I guess that makes me an LLM? These are patterns I was taught for years in school, both in high school and in college level technical writing classes. They may be tropes - or rather patterns - but that's because they were taught en masse to students across North America. Like you said, to really sound like an average person, the answer would be to write in an inconsistent, meandering way full of logical fallacies.
- Terretta 7mo ago> write in an inconsistent, meandering way full of logical fallacies I see what you did there.
- 7mo ago
- lametti 7mo agoIt's unfortunate that "smart" quotes are listed. Most CMS worth their salt (and even static site generators and word processors) should be able to generate typographically appropriate and localized quotes for anything that isn't a quick comment.
- devonkelley 7mo ago[dead]
- BoredomIsFun 7mo agoHere what kimi thinks: The post is moralizing theater masquerading as craft wisdom. “Just write it yourself” ignores the actual quality curve. Give a modern LLM a one-paragraph brief, ask for 600 words, then spend three minutes deleting the three most obvious adjectives and one “delve.” The result is already clearer, better structured, and more grammatically airtight than what 80 % of English-literate adults can produce in twenty distracted, coffee-spilled minutes. That isn’t speculation; it’s what every A/B test in every newsroom, ad agency, and SEO shop shows when copy is anonymized and editors pick winners. The average human twenty-minute draft loses—every single week.
- devonkelley 7mo ago[dead]
- hananova 7mo agoI don’t care what an LLM thinks though. Care to share your own thoughts?
- BoredomIsFun 7mo agoMy reply has several layers, if it is not obvious - and one of the layers is my statement - can you guess what it is?
- hananova 7mo agoAt the point it becomes clear a comment is written by AI it gets filed away as spam. I am not about to go crawling through the slop to find the nugget of stuff you wrote yourself. I do not care to take a guess. If you had a statement to share, then just do that.
- cadamsdotcom 7mo agoWould be interesting to turn this into code (or an external model call) that can check any writing, so instead of just handing it to an LLM and hoping the LLM obeys, a set of checks has to pass before the LLM’s writing is even shown to a human.. Kind of like enforcing linting or pre-commit checks but for prose.
- saint-evan 7mo ago>Disclaimer: Creation of this file was AI-assisted. If you thought I was going to write out a .md file for AI myself you must be mad. AI for AI. Human for Human. 'you must be mad'. Aggressively hilarious. Love it!
- jari_mustonen 7mo agoSome of these are neccesary parts of LLM's. They use the content they create to direct what they are going to say. This applies to patterns like "In conclusion, ..." and what the author calls "Fractal summary". Turn them off, and the general quality of the AI thought gets lower.
- anotheryou 7mo agoBold-First Bullets, i do and like
- rdiddly 7mo agoI have a suspicion that saddling a chat context with all this instruction would paradoxically produce worse results due to being overconstrained. But I haven't tested this. It's just that some of these are legitimate writing techniques that are simply overused. Is every single one of them always and automatically bullshit? Also whoever claims "no human writes like this" hasn't been to LinkedIn... though the humanity of those writers might be debatable. But all the vapidity, all the pointless chatter to fill up time and space, it learned that from us. I wouldn't have delegated this to an AI. Human for human, human for AI.
- aprentic 7mo agoThe next big game is going to be played by LLM designers. Points will be assigned for successfully influencing humans to use stupid language patterns. If you can convince people that SVO is a distinctly AI pattern it's an automatic win.
- Kye 7mo ago>> "Consider this list: https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md" https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md" >> "How would you organize these LLM quirks, ontologically speaking? I have this notion that the better path is to identify what kinds of things are emerging and prompt to do those things better; accept it as something LLMs are going to do and treat it as something to improve on instead of something to eliminate." The output is a bit better on blind prompting with applying the results. Here's the gist: 1. Compression artifacts — the model encoding structure implicitly 2. Attention-economy mimicry — the model trained on engagement-optimized writing 3. False epistemic confidence — the model performing knowledge it doesn't have 4. Affective prosthetics — the model simulating emotional register it can't inhabit 5. Mechanical coherence substitutes — the model managing the problem of continuity Spot corrections are too spotty. Going higher levels with these kinds of problems seems to work better.
- HocusLocus 7mo agoThis laundry list is THE CHEF'S KISS. No, that one wasn't in there
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- awnist 7mo ago[dead]