5 ms·
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"
by rpdillon 3mo ago
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 3mo agoYes, 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.
- jambalaya8 3mo agoActually, 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoWhat 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 3mo agoYes, I am saying the patterns were emergent already in 2017/2018.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoSure, 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 3mo agoConsider 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.
- mohamedkoubaa 3mo agoThis is exactly why humans invented the idea of things going in and out of style.
- _carbyau_ 3mo agoIt is one thing to be labelled as "old fashioned" but entirely another to be labelled as an LLM.
- sheept 3mo agoEven 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-writers-should-use-them-more-sparingly.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/05/em-dashes-why-write...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo agoGod help me if Claude starts using inline parentheticals, I might just have to take a vow of (online) silence.
- abustamam 3mo agoGlad 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 3mo agoAll 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 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201782634
- palmotea 3mo ago> 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-architecture-of-the-film-world/ https://www.ferrovial.com/blog/en/2018/03/the-fake-architect...).
- nathias 3mo agowhat do you mean, which tells are good writing practices? as I see them they are all truly terrible even if authored by humans
- jghn 3mo agounfortunately 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 3mo agoI've used it since that simpsons episode "it's a load bearing poster..."
- jghn 3mo agoI'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 3mo agoI have a bad habit of doing this with things players have said on Just A Minute and have just lodged in my brain.
- pseudohadamard 3mo agoAnd any petrolhead will be familiar with the phrase "it's structural rust".
- koolba 3mo agoWhich is a perfectly cromulent usage of the phrase.
- willmarch 3mo agoYou don’t have to self censor to appease others
- JSR_FDED 3mo agoAgree you don’t. But from a purely self-interested perspective, you might want to avoid phrases that to others indicate low effort.
- greedo 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoThough 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.
- renegade-otter 3mo agoWhen 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.
- phs318u 3mo agoGood 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.
- optimalquiet 3mo agoI'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.
- apparent 3mo agoStories 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 3mo agoOr if confronted just say you were using it first, and Claude must have copied you.
- tessierashpool 3mo agoClaude'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.)
- xp84 3mo agoIt'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.
- DANmode 3mo ago> 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.
- renegade-otter 3mo agoThe 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".
- megous 3mo agoNever met a chemist did you? Or a musician, or a philosopher, or a biologist... :D Such a limited life.
- customguy 3mo agoFighting 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70KCZxDbgko
- pseudohadamard 3mo agoExactly. Bots extrude text, they don't synthesize it for you.
- malshe 3mo agoI 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
- Grimblewald 3mo agoI 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 3mo ago> 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875153
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- DANmode 3mo ago“Now the only coworker who will sit with me at lunch is Claude. Alice, what do I do?”
- artemonster 3mo agoIts not them. Its you. You are real, this is what matters. /claude
- Waterluvian 3mo agoHonest take: Claudisms have become a load-bearing part of my vocabulary.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- azalemeth 3mo agoIf I see the phrase "The honest take: I was wrong" again I will scream...
- matthewdgreen 3mo agoI love "vibes in a trenchcoat" and I don't care if it makes me sound like an LLM.
- ALLTaken 3mo agoThere 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.
- worthless-trash 3mo agoIn 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 3mo agoIt 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...
- jeffhuys 3mo agoWhenever 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 3mo agoThat's practically a slider that could be added to the settings. Spelling, grammar, structure, word misuse, etc...
- thundoe 3mo agoMy manager talks like Claude and often goes on for hours, we’re laughing at them so much in private chats day&night
- dspillett 3mo agoI'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,
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]