In the olden days, I enjoyed Opus 3 because it was easy to have it sound way more human than GPT.

Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death, it’s so incredibly hard to have them write in a different voice than their default. I put together a skill to review its writing and have it edit its own output (e.g. code comments), which does make a difference, but isn’t perfect.

What, if anything, do people do for writing? That feels like a neglected side of LLMs. They’ll make 100 Bash calls referencing ancient commands without batting an eye but heaven forbid they use something other than “load-bearing” while talking. For something trained on “all the human knowledge” it’s incredible how limited their default vocabulary seems to be.

And there’s the smoking gun.

I like to think that the reason it's so noticable is that Claude has recognized some important semantics that we ourselves lack a good word for or at least under-appreciate. What term is used in English (or other languages) with the same meaning as claude's "load-bearing"?

operative? key? critical? decisive?

The honest conclusion is that none of those are as good as "load-bearing". And yet the concept being referred to is clearly extremely important and valuable to refer to. So maybe we should be learning from Claude rather than complaining.

Is this a belt-and-suspenders solution?

I'll make sure that the script is idempotent.

I maintain a list of phrases I beg it not to use that it frequently ignores:

- smoking gun - blast radius - landed - spine - earned its keep - grammar - spike - cutover - bake - sprint, epic, story points (all Agile vocabulary) - paper-cuts - amazing, incredible, perfect

I enjoyed this.

I'm surprised there's no LoRa layer or auto RL or adversarial step to reduce the stock phrases as they pop up. Is it really so hard to push these out? Or is it just whack-a-mole no matter what you do?

I wrote a thing about exactly this, but I'm resistant to blogging for undefined reasons so, maybe this will help someone...

# AI speech is an Infohazard

Apart from all its other possible boons and ills, one danger of AI is just that it is useful, so you use it. A lot.

In earlier days I would dive deeply into an author's work and start to think and write like them for a while. It was a heady feeling: slinging sonnets like Shakespeare—not at his level, but stylistically reminiscent—or tweaking turns like Twain.

Like all things, the effect lasts in relation to how long and how much you do it. The point is: our thinking is influenced by what we take in. Take more of a certain thing in, think more like that thing.

Now enter AI. My hand-crafted coding days are in their twilight months ("AI years"), and most of my software engineering is done through jaggedly capable agentic power tools. Instead of working directly with raw codestuff, I work with slop prose flecked with code sprinkles.

I read orders of magnitude more AI-speak—I call it "babble", or perhaps "Babel"—than human-written text. I can feel its genuinely honest points, clearly stated, slipping their banal tendrils into my thoughts and inner monologue.

Solutions? For me:

1. Be aware. "I notice that my thought stream is under assault."

2. Read stuff far from slop. Even a small dose of the good stuff can help inoculate. Recently I thought On the Calculation of Volume was something completely different.

3. Write stuff that is different. This post. Force the mind to synthesize thoughts in other ways.

4. debabel.py / debabel.js: a tool, and a pi extension, which filters common babble from visible LLM output. A lint for mind-killing prose.

It is not perfect, but it 80/20s nicely. I am willing to accept mildly awkward prose to avoid polluting my own internal distributions.

Details and example in the first comment. Tool available upon request.

I don't really care if it says load-bearing or belt and suspenders so long as it's using them correctly, which it mostly does.

I don't know how programmers, who are so used to staring at the same handful of keywords every day for decades, have suddenly become so discerning.

Yes, Claude writes boring and predictable prose. It also writes boring and predictable code. That's good!

Even great words, phrases, and styles, seen too often, grate.

I personally love a lot of the Claude (or LLM) lingo. Load-bearing, gate, canonical, blast radius, and friends do a lot of tight, effective heavy-lifting in my world. I even love the em-dashes (—) and the *bold the main points* memo style, both of which I have used successfully for decades.

It's seeing them in every analysis and post—the constant repetition becoming over-repetition—that makes them the Claude voice shouting "AI wrote this!" that seems to be causing LLM allergic reactions.

> replacement "you're absolutely right": "I'm a complete clown"

Omg, that hit hard. We really need more of this.

Just ask it to aim for a Flesh-Kincaid ease-of-readability score of around 70. Or use ELI5 style. Or both.

SillyTavern folks have been perfecting the unslop solutions for years now.

Gotta be a way to draw from their progress.

The reason it talks that way is clearly am attempt to hook into your dopamine system.

If what you told it to do is 'load bearing' then its important.

'You are absolutely right', because you are a smart fellow.

'Honest take', because it's being honest with you because it trusts you and you should do the same.

My 'honest take' these are absolutely garbage patterns that have no place in an session interacting with AI.

1. 'Load bearing' is a figure of speech that bears no loads.

2. 'You are absolutely right' it's not the agents job to judge that, it's job is to do what I told it to do.

3. 'Honest take', so everything else was not honest? Absolute honesty should be the default and is implied.

These words add nothing to the task at hand they are a poor attempt to hook you into using this particular model.

Lately, I feel like as GEN AI text becomes the majority, human-written text is starting to resemble it too.

I'm Korean, and there are sites and people who mainly curate the latest technologies. Even those people, probably tired of translating every time, have started summarizing things with AI. But recently, I've noticed that even when people don't use AI, their writing is starting to look like GEN AItext.

I think the reason might be that people often base their thoughts on documents they've read, or paste parts of content when writing their own texts, which leads to that style.

I'm not sure. Whether human writing is better or AI writing is better—personally, AI writing tends to flow in a very even, paragraph-by-paragraph structure, which makes it good for consuming information. I wouldn't want to read a novel written that way, but for getting information, AI writing is surprisingly convenient.

very load bearing suggestion.

I recently started using caveman, and it’s been great. It doesn’t just cut down on overuse of specific terms; it cuts down on time spent digesting slop in general.

https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

It's good, because it's just post-processing before display. So it doesn't interfere with the process, which those phrases that seem so offensive to sensibilities of so many people, for whatever reason, might be a part of.

Ask AI about castor beans and barley, it will stop all that nonsense.

Maybe implementing it as a hook via a regex replace is a better shaped solution?

“Smoking gun”