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Comment by phoghed | Hacker News Reader

That line doesn’t strike me as overtly AI written, overall yes though

It's using a couple textbook [1] LLM tropes, 'negative parallelism' with a 'here's the kicker' tone.

[1] https://gist.github.com/ossa-ma/f3baa9d25154c33095e22272c631...

I've seen Douglas Adams use almost exactly this in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. A professor (IIRC) is talking to a former student. Quoting from memory

"Did you ever actually finish any papers?"

"No. But the reasons why not were always absolutely fascinating."

So, yeah, for me personally it's not an AI tell. I've seen it in the wild before AI.

Yeah, but that doesn't sound like AI at all. Not even close.

In that quote, Adams doesn't repeat himself, before making an assertion. He realises the audience has more of a context window than three words.

The same is not true, of the token generation that... Mostly Claude models... Have taken to.

LLMs glom onto pre-existing tropes, idioms, and verbal constructs.

And then subtly misuse them.

LLMs write like some people cook, adding bespoke artisanal Belgian sea salt, truffle oil and weirdly specific cheese without any thought given to how the result will taste.

> And then subtly misuse them.

For example?

https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2098868942685012405

I always have a tinge of...perhaps 'sadness' when reading such articles because they are a lot like those large fishing nets that drag along the bottom of the ocean catching and destroying in quantities unneeded. From this list:

- Quietly/Delve/Tapestry/Landscape: they're all lovely words. I love(d) using them.

- "Serves as": I use this all the time too.

- "The result? Devastating". Perhaps it is a bit stilted, but "Outcome? Predictable." could be a nice turn of phrase.

- "It's worth noting": All academics everywhere use this in papers. See also: "Notably", "Essentially", "In general" and other such fillers that we reach for.

- "Think of it as": This is such a useful phrase to explain something. Analogy is how we learn after all.

- The fucking em dashes. I love them, and screw everyone who suggests one should stop using them. One big reason for using linux is the compose key, so the em dash is never far away.

- Same with the unicode decoration. Nah, screw you. I use these symbols all the time: °, ×, →, ⇒ etc. in my own notes. Again, compose key ftw.

Etc. (the list is endless)

I know what people will say, that everything is contextual, one has to study case-by-case etc. But I can't help feeling that someone is pointing a finger at me and accusing me before-the-fact. Just, AI has polluted the joy of writing.

I wouldn't fret too much: AI is still advancing so quickly that these specific tells will only last a short time. And then you are free to use em-dashes again, or at least no one will care.

But it is specifically one of Claude's ticks

It is. And the reason for that is* surprising: the base knowledge corpus is clickbait internet articles.

*not at all

I suspect it’s more like Claude etc. optimizing for a tone that gets the green checkmark from RLHF reviewers, probably over and over in many contexts where style is otherwise an incidental concern.

It is more surprising than that: it's because the humans in the loop like it.

If you're being given an A-B choice between cinnamon-flavored shit and lutfisk-flavored shit, you might convince the experimenter that cinnamon-flavored shit ranks highly in user preferences.

I would expect a preference for lutefisk flavored shit, the problem is then you then deduce from that that people prefer lutefisk flavor over cinnamon, rather than that you should stop feeding people shit (and also stop feeding them lutefisk.)

The LLMs are going to turn us into stochastic parrots.

I'm guessing he means overall the kind of circling and concluding that Claude does, like "the actual truth is more interesting than it seems" or "the real smoking gun is not the x, it's the y that was under our noses all this time" type of writing.

"That's not a result, that's a broken harness, and it's worth publishing because I expect it to be common."

That's Claude. But I agree and am also glad the author, uh, clauded this up. :)