I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize its an LLM.
Only mentioning because your "actually" may imply you thought you were disagreeing, when in fact it's one big happy family!
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/05/em-dashes-why-write...
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-architect...).
as I see them they are all truly terrible even if authored by humans
"it's a load bearing poster..."
If/when AGI arrives I assume this tactic will stop working.
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.
LLMs are tiring to read, but a self-entitled “[amateur] writer with very good English skills and expansive vocabulary”? Now that’s just exhausting.
EDIT: a long press on the dash key gives you the option of a long dash but I definitely didn’t do that. Or at least, have no conscious memory of doing that.
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.)
1. Dying laughing at “ it's not delivery, it's DiGiorno's"
2. They do it because it’s succinct, and unambiguous.
Or a musician, or a philosopher, or a biologist... :D
Such a limited life.
Fighting 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
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.
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.
I no longer put a lot of effort into ensuring documents feel right when writing them.
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...
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,
But if I'm reading what is supposed to be someone's original thoughts, it's a huge bummer to see an obvious AI tell. You might say that "it's not just disappointing—it's disrespectful."
I get just as mad about shitty human output as I do about shitty LLM output. The bad thing about LLMs is that they have increased the volume of shit most people have to sift through.
When you open a requirements doc and it’s got 13 load bearing em dashes on the first page you known it’s gonna be bad day
To me, it's disrespectful to expect someone to waste their day reading every word of a blog post when even the author has not read every word. It shows that you value your time over your reader's time.
There was an HN submission recently where the author spent a lot of time and effort working with an LLM to write a story and get the LLM to follow a specific style and whatnot. Wish I could recall it offhand. Many commenters were very upset when they found out it was LLM generated, even though they couldn’t tell while reading it.
Basically what matters to me is some combo of how much effort went into it, and how accurate it is.
This has almost nothing to do with your reply.
I use the humanize skill to clean up AI written work before handing it over to colleagues.
I still keep the AI label even if I edit the result for correctness or clarity etc. The last thing I want to do is have someone read AI content and think it came directly from me. I really don't understand the thinking of people that do that - it's like they're hiding or intentionally cheating somehow.
AI generated content can be really, really useful (with some guidance, AI is way better at creating useful git commit messages and jira ticket comments than I am), but pretending that content is yours just seems way too much like straight up lying.
Because it just feels lazy. It triggers my "If you couldn't be bothered to write it, why do you expect me to spend my time reading it" allergy.
I don't use any paid AI or any agents. I just use some of their free interactive question answering interfaces.
There have been some times where I've been doing a project in a language or environment that I do not use a lot, and maybe need to use language or environment features I've never had occasion to learn.
I don't ask AI to write it for me, or even to write any particular functions. I might ask it some syntax questions, or what data structure in the language's standard library is usually used for a particular task. Mostly I use it as an interactive manual that is really good at generating examples if I need clarification on how something works.
If you were working on a similar project and posted asking questions about it, there is a decent chance I could write a useful answer for you.
Suppose the questions would have fairly involved answers, and it might take me 30 minutes to write up something entirely in my own words. That is still going to include knowledge that I got from the AI when I questioned it earlier.
I could also cover the same points, except for parts of it where what I'd be saying is mostly just writing in my own words what the AI taught me (and which I verified is correct before using), so might have to only spend about 4 minutes writing original material, and another minute doing some selected copy/paste from the AI (maybe with some editing).
That 5 minute answer would be exactly as useful in answering your questions as the 30 minute answer.
I don't know you. I have no reason to try to help you other than a general "it is nice to help people" thing.
If you can't be bothered to read it because I didn't spend 500% more time than was necessary to fully answer your questions (time that benefits me in no way whatsoever), why should I bother answering at all?
I would prefer you give me whatever part of your answer takes you five minutes and then I can work from there on my end, in the method and with the tools I see fit. In other words - give me the prompt.
Totally possible I'm misunderstanding the situation you're presenting, though.
Suppose instead I found that algorithm by describing the task I needed an algorithm for and asking an AI for the most used algorithms for that task. I picked one of its suggestions, read up on it to make sure what the AI said about it is correct, and then I implemented it. If when explaining how the project works to others I say "Here is a good explanation from <cite to AI> on how this algorithm works. I have verified that this is accurate", and quote the AIs explanation how is that different from the book case?
I mean this is fine really, as long it's clear to me that you've actually done something with the content. And it's okay when I already know you and know that you actually do the research on the topics the LLM retrieves for you. It's much different when you don't know each other and you just get some generated response. I have no clue if you've digested the information and verified it before giving it to me, or just tossed it over the fence.
The big issue I have with it in this thread is things like blog posts and comments that seem straight up copied from the LLM. At that point the blog seems meaningless to me. It's not the author's work, it's ChatGPT or Claude, so why would I bother reading their prompt's output. I go to a blog for their writing, not the LLM.
Similarly, I go to a concert to hear the artists. I would be very uninterested to a see an empty stage and hearing an AI generated "live version" blasting through the speakers.
But if you do not know the environment, and use AI to create the answers and phrasing. Then you don't really sound like the authority to help me on that particular subject. Why not refer to the authority on the subject instead, or just send the prompts instead so the person on the other end can do their own processing.
If you don't know the answer to something, you don't need to reply. I get the idea of wanting to help people, and it's a nice sentiment. But it's also good to know where your expertise ends.
And the issue with these large generated blog post type things is that I don't know how well the author actually understands the subject. The LLM might've just gotten the right info and and wrote some confident text surrounding it. But it's framed as if the person wrote it. When they might just passing it off as their own. But I don't read blog posts or seek out forums to converse with LLMs, if I wanted that I would've used the LLM myself. Because if it's not the person's own thoughts, what's even the point of communication.
AI as Personal
AI as Public.
Personal AI users adapt to the tool, but they keep the "sausage" bits private. And often recoil at seeing them in public.
Public AI users want to show everyone everything about how they use the tool, and dont care if their content is obviously generated.
I definitely fall in the private camp myself, very rarely sharing anything generated even with close friends.
I guess you could write an editor that does it? Tracks the origin of every word in the document? But what if you cut'n'paste a word? Or worse, see it and retype it manually?
I think the best you can hope for here is "this text was written with AI assistance".
After about a month of reading his stuff I started to notice the Claudisms. And once you see them you can't unsee them, they start to pop up everywhere. I have no idea if he was using an LLM to "improve" his writing, or was "vibe-authoring" the whole thing.
I unfollowed, and now I have this creeping feeling that much of what I see in any given day on the Internets is actually AI slop, and I just haven't seen the signs yet.