5 ms·
Why is Anthropic's public writing style so unlike Claude's?
- wiradikusuma 2mo agoOn the bright side, I'll know immediately a post is Claude-generated. If the author didn't bother writing it, I don't bother reading it. /s?
- reddozen 2mo agoThis is where the concern-trolls barge in with "what about non native English speakers using AI to blogslop everything is actually a good tool!"
- redsocksfan45 2mo ago[dead]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- stuaxo 2mo agoI mean, don't other people bail out of stuff that in slop style?
- miranaproarrow 2mo agowhats troubling here is that one of the anthropic devs on twitter or github don't seem to acknowledge this issue, If they don't acknowledge there's nothing for them to fix
- miranaproarrow 2mo agoIve given up trying to fight claudes language, and Im afraid Im getting used to it and can even understand what claude is saying faster or should I say I can parse it faster now.
- miranaproarrow 2mo agogate= some sort of a guard or test name= a variable name or fields load bearing= coupled dependencies that can break other things if you change it
- knollimar 2mo agoLoad bearing irks me having a construction background. Claude will often comment on it using the phrase wrong when it gets context.
- ricardobeat 2mo ago[dead]
- alex43578 2mo agoWhile these are clunky, was this phraseology that much of a problem for people? I don't like reading it, but I didn't find that I couldn't read it.
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoBut slowing down to decipher text instead of single pass simple reading is the problem. Random example from a session I have open: > *One new failure mode the doubling opens, and how it is closed.* A ring never shrinks. With two 8-byte index words per record instead of one, the ring's doubling comes inside the budget's reach in the blank regime: a doubling taken [...] It takes extra deciphering cycles to see "the doubling", "budget's reach", "the blank regime", etc. and figure out what it's referring to. I had to read that opening sentence multiple times. At first I parsed it like "One cat the table yawns". Sometimes it's so encumbered I can't tell what it's saying at the directional level: good or bad, fast or slow? "Your blank regime negated the pre-armed run's dilemma but clawed back the overall metrics." It's not how I'd phrase things if I were trying to be easily understood, though Claudese is probably great for LLMs due to ad hoc jargon usage.
- alex43578 2mo ago
- simonw 2mo agoAnthropic's guide for job applicants on how you should use Claude when applying for a job there is relevant here: https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoI’ve read the link, but I don’t get how it’s relevant to the OP’s point that Anthropic public communications don’t sound like Claude. Can you enlighten me?
- gjvc 2mo agowhy do you care?
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoBecause Simon usually posts interesting comments. Do I need a different reason?
- simonw 2mo agoBecause it's the most clear indication Anthropic have given of policies around AI writing with respect to their own company. Things like: > Not allowed: Prompt: "Write my answers to the application questions for an AI safety researcher position at Anthropic." Result: Generic content with experiences you haven't actually had I haven't seen other policy documents from them that are as relevant to the question anywhere else.
- names_are_hard 2mo agoI find the language of "collaborating with Claude" off-putting. I don't collaborate with Claude, I use Claude. It's a tool in my hands, not a colleague or a friend.
- michaelt 2mo agoAI companies seem eager to perpetuate the fantasy that all users carefully review all LLM output, and supervise all tool calls. Anthropic certainly isn't planning to take responsibility for Claude's mistakes - that's the user's responsibility. Describing everything as 'collaborating' is I think part of their efforts to emphasise the user's role in the process.
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoOther than the specific phrases like load-bearing etc, I find the biggest tell of all just to be repetition. Every damn Claude article does the “tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what you told ‘em” routine.
- BoredomIsFun 2mo agoStiff, repetive style is often a result of very small, less than 0.5 sampling temperature, very small top-k, very high min-p etc. Most of "normies" (wrt to /r/localllama and /r/sillytavernai) never tweak the samplers.
- weird-eye-issue 2mo agoYou must not be doing much real work with these models, otherwise you would know that with the latest Claude models you can't even adjust the temperature or top p/k The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters
- BoredomIsFun 2mo ago> You must not be doing much real work with these models, otherwise you would know that with the latest Claude models you can't even adjust the temperature or top p/k No, I do not. Good for me I guess. > The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters What an absurd claim.
- weird-eye-issue 2mo agoHave fun toying around with your local models and leave the real work to the rest of us buddy
- BoredomIsFun 2mo agoHave fun using web-interfaces for overpriced US models while I am getting my work done with Chinese models for a fraction of price on openrouter using API. Besides, when using API I am sure all American models, including Claude honour sampling settings.
- salvozappa 2mo agoAnthropic's public writing style is very different from Claude's because it's written by humans. Even in their job ads they ask candidates to not use AI for any writing (or at least they used to).
- hirako2000 2mo agoMakes sense. Steve jobs didn't let his kid touch apple devices.
- a34729t 2mo agoThe first rule of drug dealers: Don't use your own drug!
- HedonicEscal8r 2mo agoThe phrase is, "don't get high on your own supply."
- emeg 2mo agoOne of the Ten AI Commandments.
- mbac32768 2mo agoYes. AIs are a lot better at coding than they are at writing. I author less than 1% of the code I push these days, but still write the grand majority of emails and posts. Probably I would do it 100% human if it was high stakes and I expected it to be read by millions.
- perching_aix 2mo agoI do really enjoy the style of their blogposts, they remind me of the Cloudflare postmortems. Wish their models could produce it. Not sure I agree about e.g. GPT not sounding this formulaic though, imo it definitely does. I don't actually have a problem with the common terms Claude emits, I think they're appropriate for a coding agent. But I do find them overused.
- toasty228 2mo agoSame reason the tech execs kids aren't using the tools created by their parents
- stavros 2mo agoYou think Tim Cook's kids don't use iPhones? Or that Larry Ellison's kids don't use Oracle Financial Services Adaptive Intelligence Foundation for Anti Money Laundering Application?
- lemming 2mo agoSteve Jobs famously didn't let his kids use iPads (and restricted their access to tech pretty heavily, it seems). If you watch the Social Dilemma, it's full of people who invented what we consider fundamental tech, but don't let their families use any of it because they can see the problems it causes. It makes the techno-optimism ring pretty hollow.
- stavros 2mo agoLet's not conflate "this technology isn't for kids" with "this technology is bad", though. I wouldn't want my kids using a tablet, but I wouldn't want anyone using a gun.
- xdertz 2mo agoI wouldn't let kids use a sharp kitchen knife either, but it is still something that everyone benefits from owning.
- weird-eye-issue 2mo agoBut do we really benefit from smartphones?
- hagbard_c 2mo agoDepends how 'we' use them. Society as a whole probably does not benefit because of the severe drawbacks these devices have for those who can't resist the lure of 'social' media and garbage factories like TikTok. Individuals can certainly benefit from having an internet-connected pocket computer which so happens to also be capable of making and receiving phone calls.
- BoredomIsFun 2mo agoThere are many different ways to make an LLM sound more human-like (the author has actually explicitly mentioned ChatGPT sounds more natural). For their public announcements etc. they might as well used specially trained small 24-32B creative writing model or put a LoRA on top of their Haiku. One could also use "antislop" samplers, maybe some encoder-decoder unslopping postprocessing small models etc. Or they simply may have been written by humans.
- swiftcoder 2mo ago> or put a LoRA on top of their Haiku Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models?
- BoredomIsFun 2mo ago> Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models? Oddly enough standalone LoRA adapters are very popular in image generation world and utterly unpopular in LLM world - there it is customary just to distribute fully merged models on HF. Having said that I personally use a finetune of Qwen 3.6, Qwen3.6-27B-Fable-Fusion-711-Uncensored-Heretic, which was was not designed for creative writing per se but is far better than any other 24B-32B model I've tried for writing, let alone awful vanilla Qwen 3.6.
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2mo agoInteresting use case, with so many finetune available at HF, how you determine a good models?
- BoredomIsFun 2mo ago/r/localllama, /r/sillytavernai for leads and then personal vibe check.
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoWhy would they use Haiku for anything? They aren't paying for the tokens.
- andyferris 2mo agoI've spent my spare time in the last _days_ rewriting a pretty small document made in collaboration with Fable. It was reluctant to simplify the proposed design. And the language is so dense - it's almost poetic in nature and concision, but I wanted a clear discourse about a complex topic with people whose native language is not English. It's an interesting model/tool. Powerful but still chock full of trade-offs. I hope the next model's language is more like e.g. OpenAI models in terms of language use. (oh, and the code comments, yikes).
- esperent 2mo ago> wanted a clear discourse about a complex topic with people whose native language is not English. Did you try specifically telling it that? I haven't used Fable but I do write lots of docs for a non native audience and I get good results from stating that.
- PatronBernard 2mo agoClaude Code's creative use of language in an engineering context is often quite infuriating. I want language to be as simple as possible, it should be accessible and require as little context as possible. Below are a few examples that Code wrote that I encountered in my own work (related to signal processing): "excursion" (means: a spike/jump — a value that rises or deviates from baseline, just say spike or outlier) "legitimate majority-normal baseline" (means: a real majority of normal pixels) "matched pool of pure-noise ('normal') pixels" (means: the same number of normal pixels, don't bring pools into this) "ablation" (means: comparing before vs. after — turning a thing on/off to see what changes) I actually used Claude Code to try and find examples like these but not entirely unexpectedly it had a very hard time detecting these, even though I encounter them like every other sentence. I can imagine this style is great when writing prose, not so much when writing documentation. Similarly, I tried using Claude Design to make some slides, and the individual slides were fine, but just about every other slide it used different words to denote the same concept, which I would say is the fastest way to lose your audience.
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoI don't see why Anthropic would be expected to publish default Claude voice or use Claude for their public writing. No matter how great AI is, it doesn't commit you to using it for everything. And they probably know basic LLM tricks like "write it in the style of X". When you read a blog post with Claude voice, you're seeing the result of someone who couldn't even be bothered to do that which is why they deserve extra lashings.
- rossy 2mo ago> And they probably know basic LLM tricks like "write it in the style of X". You can probably get it to do a surface-level impression of Mark Twain that way, but from what I've heard, it's not that easy to prompt Claude out of the "voice" described in the article for technical writing, and all existing methods, like asking it to ELI5 or tropes.fyi, only have partial success.
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoFor a single document like a blog post it should be easy, though you don't have to sub a famous author in for X. There are all sorts of ways to do it though, like pointing it to an example doc.
- redsocksfan45 2mo ago[dead]