(I'm becoming allergic to how these things write).
In high school I had a teacher that would say “that type of thing” a lot. One time my friend and I counted it during one class period and he averaged to use the phrase every 48 seconds on average. It was funny, but it never irritated us.
And this is just one example of I am sure thousands I have personally experienced where a friend, family member, or coworker has a peculiar way of speaking and it at most feels odd but not annoying. Yet when I see an emdash now I instantly feel irritated.
And I say this as someone who actively enjoys using Claude and other LLMs, including coding, casual research, or even having it explain pop culture phenomenon or sociology research to me.
Because they are HEAVILY trained to give addictive responses.
They don't want to just answer your question. They want to sycophantically make you feel like a genius for being smart enough to use them.
I've heard this a lot but I'm not sure it makes sense. Nobody I talk to like Claude's output. In fact, they all loathe it.
Is there a silent majority of Claude users who really enjoy what we call the LLM-isms? Maybe, but isn't Claude also largely aimed at developers?
Purely out of my own curiosity, I just asked Claude to have fun with itself by making itself a game it enjoys, to play it, and to write its experience.[1] I don't know if it's true or confabulated (maybe it doesn't really know its experience and is just hallucinating it) but I didn't mind reading it, the prose is fine for me. I don't mind reading Claude's writing. I mean let's be honest, we all read Claude's writing all day, most of the submissions on the front page on any given day are written by Claude.
Just before I made that game, I had Fable write up a scholarly report on any subject[2], it chose introspection by LLM's. (This is what made me think of asking it to play a game.) I didn't mind reading it, even though I don't think it really added anything very interesting. I don't think what it wrote is worth publishing, but I read it with interest.
I found I could read it easily and get up to date on the state of this question that it picked to answer.
So the bottom line is I don't mind reading Claude's output that much. Of course, I'm annoyed every time it says "honest", "genuine", "load-bearing", whenever it pushes back gently against something, etc. But it's not the end of the world.
[1] https://github.com/robss2020/claude-fable-5-having-fun
[2] https://claude.ai/share/f0122611-22c0-43a5-ab4a-d6863167bdd6
If you haven't already seen it, you might appreciate https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace. That's what this made me think of anyway.
Real human writing doesn’t follow such strict rules. When the same small set of rules is applied over and over throughout a text, it becomes obviously strange and machine-like.
- The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated.While I agree that no-one used to write like that as a whole before, all the elements can be found in different places. Short sentences to avoid discouraging poor readers. Maximally impactful statements are commonly used in marketing or other business communication that's focused on selling what it's saying. A bullet-pointy style is used in many kinds of business communication. Etc.
It makes me wonder if part of what happened was a kind of melding of common styles from several different kinds of writing.
I'm a fan of that phrasing because it used to have real punch if you delivered it with the right timing.
"It's Not A Fashion Statement, It's A Death Wish" comes to mind.
There are sociological reasons why this happens less with humans:
1. You cycle your dumb repetitive jokes with everyone you meet, so nobody hears it twice
2. Those who know you well will notice when you're just repeating ("dad jokes")
3. As a person's idiosyncrasies are beginning to wear on their social circles, they will be getting small clues to stop saying those things. Agents don't get these social between-the-lines cues to stop a certain behavior, they endlessly repeat. Perhaps between model version releases, frontier labs can harvest the web and ask "What Claudisms do people mention negatively?" but I don't think they do that yet.
That won't happen. People can't phrase their objections in a succinct-enough way. When they do, the objection is superficial ("too many em dashes") and doesn't strike at the core of what makes LLM output bad.
In the future, I hope we get a way to randomize the language idiosyncrasies and/or personalities better.
This is kind of a nitpick, but it seems like with prose writing there are still some things to learn.
Honestly I don't think it would take much. Doing it ethically would take a little more money, but not much, for them.
Hire a prolific author with the writing equivalent of the "midwestern accent". I have a terrible writing accent, so it couldn't be me, but these people are out there. Pay them a bunch of dollars to ingest their entire corpus, and to produce more as needed. Use an LLM to match the writing style of this author during the post-training RL, and get a brand new Claude voice out of it.
It's immediately obvious by the fact that you're clearly using way different ways of speaking (tone, speed, vocabulary) when you're speaking with a friend, versus your parents, your colleagues, people you don't know, children, etc.
Because it's trained to talk like a marketing committee.
This is the thing that LLM writing doesn't really do. Since there isn't a mental state, there's nothing to mirror anyway, and somehow you can detect the absence of it even though it's hard to put any of the machinery into words. Corporate speech also fails to activate this machinery in the same way, but LLMs seem to do it more egregiously, probably because the corporate speech was at least compiled by a human---even if it is not the thoughts of an individual, it is the "thoughts" of an "entity", the abstract corporation, which the writer was speaking for, and so you can still wrap your mind around the fact that it is communicating with you.
I guess it has to do with the low temperature (low randomness in final word choce - something all vendors seem to have converged on for some reason) which does make them less likely to skiz out but makes the writing feel dry and samey. It's like repeating a list of dice rolls, and replaying them - there's no inherent pattern in the input, but there sure is in the output.
Honestly, this might sound elitist, but I suspect it's because it's an "advanced" punctuation that is not known by most people, so is not commonly used. But the training corpus of these models puts more weight of academic writing or published books writing where the em-dash is much more commonly used.
The verbosity makes me think of two things in particular:
- The classic essay written by someone who has 125 words worth of actual content but a 1500 word minimum. Those three paragraphs could be bullet points and convey the meaning just as well. The screen-filling chart of every test case you ran that came back green manages to be less actionable than a direct "one test out of 54 failed." I fully expect to see Claude tell us that "Support Ticket 8257 is a Land Of Contrasts" at some point.
- The sitcom trope of the person caught in a lie who figures if they can keep adding more and more detail he'll be believed and can escape the awkward conversation. Stop. Just stop. You're proposing a fix on a CODEBASE THE CUSTOMER DOES NOT EVEN USE. Cue laugh track, cut to commercial.
I think it also relates to how well the "cliches" fit, and how much sense they make. Ai loves to talk about how things "land" or "the X trap" when the concept just doesn't fit with that language. It's like clickbait articles saying "what happened next will astound you" when what happened is barely surprising or entirely predictable. The only thing worse than an overused cliche is an overused cliche used wrong.
Fundamentally to me, ai writing feels uncanny as it just doesn't know what it's saying. It uses the same tone, style and cliched construction regardless of the message. If someone told you, they got a promotion, were getting married, got laid off or lost their parents all in the same tone pacing and style, they'd come across as uncanny too.
If you think about it, "load-bearing" is a pretty commonly used concept in pedagogical writing. You could say "most important", but it's not quite the same in meaning. English just doesn't have a better word to describe a concept that occurs this frequently. The LLM's catchphrases reveal blindspots in the English language itself.
to the point where it's really great at coding, but lost its knowledge on how to write well!
if instead opus 5 was a full fresh training run, i don't think it'd be this trash at writing.
really great coding perf, but now the weights are adapted to so much code fine tuning that it writes like a weird engineer that's trying to sound smart.
- smoking gun
- I found the seam
Even an average human writer can communicate details much more succinctly and directly than an LLM
But compared to the average adult? I think you forget just how bad at writing the average person is.