At least "wedged" is a thing i would say on a spinning out of control test that is stuck. "latch" though... not so much. I really wonder if this is the EU AI Act interfering with everything Claude does these days. As a non-EU citizen, I want a version without the rewriting of with watermarking in text.
I understand it's not active yet, and when it will be, it should only nudge the chances between choices that are anyway likely and are already randomized today via temperature.
Watermarking is not the reason Claude talks like that.
Oh, it is active, and a pre-release version went out with v5 models.
I understand there are other reasons (overdone RLHF, for example) why claude is wedged into this weird way of writing that takes the joy out of conversing with it, but this is one as well.
The meaning of the words it uses can be oh so close, but the popularity of the words are not, and not in that context -- but the use of these other words changes the context ever so slightly, and then it uses other words where those words would work better.
I had something in code that related to people over time periods, and once it switches to a vacuous word choice, i found it starting talking using all ERP terms. I had to google the whole sentence to understand that, individual words were fine they just didn't make any sense to me.
Im surprised by "provenance." I see it all the time. Except I've brought this up before and have never had it corroborated. I'm starting to think it's just my Claude.
I think it's the hierarchies of agents summarizing each others' summaries before presenting a final answer to the user. The principal agent has the full context from all its workers, but when it distills this down to a message to the user it summarizes it into a mess of confident jargon that pertains to a conversation the user wasn't a part of and never saw.
I'm not even sure a PhD helps. It just overuses jargon that has NO meaning. Sometimes, it actually hand waves too much as well while trying to dumb down stuff for you.
I am not sure whether it's a consequence of learning to reason from its traces or some RLHF that trips it into using weird terms to sound smarter to the humans who rate it.
I have a PhD and can confirm. Oftentimes, the stuff which comes out of Claude is just impenetrable because it invents jargon on the fly, and uses verbs in the most atrocious ways.
"The fibred side folded its capstone into the existing name, so the kinds are asymmetric."
What on earth does it mean to fold a capstone into a name‽
Is that an actual Claude output or hyperbole? It feels like I'm trying to parse an equation in a new math class which makes me want to take a stab at it regardless.
So there's a "fibred side".. the most likely candidate seems to be "fibred categories" which I hadn't heard of before, and it's talking about one side of some mapping between two sets such that if f is the primary function and f(x)=y then there exists an inverse function g(y)=x? Was it something that converted some data bidirectionally with a different algorithm on both sides?
The capstone of the inverse function would be the most important thing about it maybe?
My best guess is "In the process of working on the inverse function, the existing name (of the inverse function itself maybe?) was made to reflect the operation of the inverse function, so now the name does not follow the same naming convention as the name of the primary function (which does not contain its 'capstone')."
Its original wording is certainly dense and harder to follow for us, but it's fascinating how the model finds this the best fit for what it's trying to express IMO. Like it arrives at its own ways of overloading words/concepts, and things we would refer to in different ways in different contexts all get compressed to the same more-useful/complete idea.
Codex has never said anything nearly so alien as the Claude examples I've seen floating around, interestingly. I wonder if it just has a better training on choosing its words to present to the user or if it inherently arrived at a somewhat different mapping that favors 'plain language' more.
I am not really sure what Claude meant, but you are not too far off, from what I understand.
I have several similar folders with variants of a construction, but taking differently structured input. They are named “plain”, “fibred” and “indexed”. So the fibred variant is clear enough.
The Claude speak I struggle with is “the capstone” and what name it could be talking about. And what folding means here. I think it just means:
“I changed an important result of the construction in the fibred variant, but kept the name. so the fibred variant is now different from the others.”
My intuition is that Claude is trained to communicate to itself while coding. You see this in how bizarrely granular it is when explanation prior work, you also see this in the comments it leaves behinds.
It's me, it's the reams of sessions I share back with a five star rating that are just Claude Code talking to itself about debugging its own generated code in jargon that has slowly diverged from anything a human would understand.
don't forget LLMs are great at translating between languages, and within the same language. depending on the problem it works on, it will often reach for terminology that tend to be more common or familiar within that problem set. which appears inscrutable, but there's many different ways to skin a cat. just remind it to translate it back to the terminology and subject matter you're already an expert in.
1. Adds a small prompt to each turn with the agent[1].
2. Is like a band-aid on a bullet wound, properly solving it would mean retraining the model and they probably are already working on it.
My experiments with output styles have not been sufficient to keep the model in check. It still spits out incomprehensible gibberish and load-bearing-isms.
Does anyone have an output style nailed down that actually works? If so, please share!
Sometimes I can't even tell if what it's saying actually makes any sense to someone who understands all the terms its using, or if it's just throwing together words in a way that only make sense to its own model of language.
It's interesting that there must be a decision behind that, even if it's just appealing to the RLHF judges for some reason. Maybe there's an intention that if you cannot decipher what the chatbot is saying to you, you will have to ask and burn even more tokens.
Naively I would often expect it would talk to me about various niche topics like to a layman, which does occur about some topics an actual normal person would ask.
I used to assume it was the fault of average human annotators. That the people who are paid peanuts to rank chat outputs preferred the pretentious sounding ones. It wasn’t until quite a bit into the LLM boom that companies started to pay for domain experts. Overt watermarking is another possibility.
I’ve noticed that Sol is pretty good most of the time, but with long contexts it’ll start to devolve into Claudish.
I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their own bias into the presentation which works well.
I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...". I started to notice I was using this pattern quite a bit somewhat recently, but I took a quick look at some of my social media posts and realized it's been occurring for a while. I had realized that I grown accustomed to this kind of language because, especially early on, LLMs would focus too much on the specific examples I'd provide when, really, I was just trying to give them a sense of what I was looking for. I just picked up that providing two examples then adding the "etc." worked to get the LLM to not focus so much on the specific examples and to understand that they need to consider more than what I explicitly presented. Of course, now I write like that in my social media comments, in Slack with my colleagues, etc. :>
I'd be interested to see if anyone can identify trends like this, since I think the human-language component of the adoption of LLMs is probably being somewhat neglected despite probably being surely dramatically affected.
Thank you for the compliment! I did spend a lot of time designing a nice experience on both desktop and mobile. Even the scrollbar to select words was non trivial as I wanted the words to be of different size, yet avoid flickering when scrolling!
Congratulations! I was going to comment on the scroll field in particular when I saw this. I didn't even realize you had to hand-craft the component, but it's such a nice UI idea in general, the way the scrolling works and how the content above changes.
Frankly, that's the one part I would have done differently. Mixing font sizes rarely looks good, but that's just my personal opinion. If you want to visually indicate intensity, I'd have used color, or rather saturation. Not the text itself, maybe a small pill next to it. But I don't think it's necessary, the order already conveys some sort of ranking, I don't think cardinal information adds much here.
You did a fantastic job; very to-the-point with effective visualisations. Kudos!
One very minor note: if your scroll device reports pixel-perfect deltas rather than discrete scroll-wheel ticks (e.g. logitech mx master, laptop touchpad, etc), the behaviour in the word search box is a bit weird. Arrow keys work fine though.
I did test it with my mac touchpad without issue. Maybe the problem is that I wanted to make discrete scroll-wheel ticks work. I just tried a fix by normalising deltaMode to pixels.
If you could just paste this in your console, I would have a better idea:
FWIW I got a bunch of "(-)10.00 native" in the console, "PAGE" never showed up no matter what I tried. Firefox, also a Logitech mouse, no trackpad though.
> Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I’ve come to believe it is more than our biology. What truly makes us human is our ability to hyperscroll!
“non-trivial” is one of those words that seems like it should be a Claude-ism but is actually just the single best word for a concept that comes up extremely often in research and engineering discussions.
In the enterprise, we are already adopting them. “Seam”, I term I’d never heard used before, is now not only our defacto way to describe the boundary between systems/workflows/components, it is encoded into our organizational roles and responsibilities descriptions.
I am the proud owner of several seams, and am considering giving them person-names. The empty space between my inventory APIs and their clients might be “Karen”.
I can’t say that Claude invented this; the same type of terminology cycling happens every few quarters based on what leadership is reading/being told by Gartner.
I believe the term "seam" came from Michael Feathers' "Working Effectively with Legacy Code": “a seam is a place where you can alter behavior in your program without editing in that place”.
I've associated it with the concept of "carving nature at the seams", except that I just realized that in the standard phrasing it's actually "at the joints", not "seams".
"seam" dates back to refactoring & software engineering literature that pre-date LLM use by 20 years -- see Working Effectively With Legacy Code for one example (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/working-effectively-wit...). Its a great book, still use techniques from it everyday.
"load-bearing" I have never heard used for programming before Opus, and its incredibly annoying and over-used.
Seam is used liberally throughout because it captures the idea well (i.e. a place where you can cleave ball of mud code apart to begin refactoring efforts in an isolated way) and that takes many different forms throughout the book whether that be via methods and classes, source files as a single unit, linker seams, on and on.
"seam" is a cop-out term for when someone (usually AI) lacks the imagination to come up with something more descriptive. It's like saying "middle thing". Just name it by what it does, and if you can't, remove it because it's not doing anything.
"load-bearing" on the other hand is just a weird way to say "required" or "prerequisite" without drawing any attention to the fact that one cannot articulate what something is a prerequisite for, probably because that fact has since been lost from context.
Saying "the language of LLMs", while technically correct, is not exactly precise. It should really be the language of "AI agents", or "chatbots". OG LLMs would just mimic the style of its context based off of (pre)training from text on the Internet.
The kind of quirks you see came from crowd-sourced human-in-the-loop fine-tuning, with not very good work conditions or level of qualification (so resulting in "what non-writers thought good writing looked like", before people had developed the flair to detect these patterns) as well as feedback loops during agentic reinforcement learning and RLVR.
I've found myself rewriting my own words to avoid Claudisms (because they can be cringe and I don't want people to think I'm copy/pasting Claude output at them).
The idiom "added color to" as an expression of adding detail or nuance to something goes back much further than the AI era. I've certainly used it at various times in my career spanning 4 decades now.
Yes, it is fun to play with different turns of phrase, even in a stale work environment. I do it to combat the banality, but not so much to sound pretentious hopefully ;)
The problem is once a fun phrase is, uh, coloured by "Claude" or some other LLM, it just turns to AI slop.
> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs.
Or we'll do the opposite and even deliberately use some words that an LLM would never use to identify whose content is worth reading?
> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...".
Why would you consider using lists an "LLM" language thing? I really don't understand this concept. Like even this project, the top words I can see are:
How are they LLM words? I used them all the time before ChatGPT was a thing.
Like if your claim is you use "etc." more because you talk to an LLM, I think you're just discovering human language, no? Like it's not a unique LLM thing that magically dropped and is now going to make people do it. It's a legit thing that most human writers have used for a long time -> which is why LLMs copy it. It's not backward.
A better claim than "people will start writing like LLMs" could be that people will become more literate in expressing themselves. But that literacy is not alien or AI to us, it is basic human language only used properly.
the issue with some of these quirks is that not that they are not part of the English language but rather the llms usage is unnatural. Also when you have that redundancy proliferated to millions of users it gets tiresome fast, and becomes a tell-tale sign for AI generation. It’s like an AI signature on some written content. Because many people do not want to consume AI generated content this becomes a sign of what to avoid.
Granted picking apart single words outside of context doesn’t give the full picture. (well except “load bearing” which is turning into a meme at this point)
> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs.
What's somewhat interesting to me is that "load-bearing" was already a common thing to say in certain communities, like lesswrong.com. Whether it breaks out from that subculture with Claude as the vector, or disappears from there because nobody wants to sound like Claude, we'll have to see. How many children are called "Elvis" these days?
That confirms the recent spike of Claude calling everything I was recently working on a 'spike'. I still don't know what that term is supposed to represent (apparently).
In some software development methodologies, "spike" is a task whose goal is figuring something out instead of delivering shippable code. https://agiledictionary.com/209/spike/
Prototype is usually something working, while spike can be pure research (e.g. validate that APIs are feasible and enough, or that something satisfies requirements). Prototype is usually more polished/usable. Experiment in my mind is something which user-facing but not in stable yet.
So for me they are differentiated enough, but could be that I am just used to it.
An experiment doesn’t say anything about user facing or not. I do tons of them when reverse engineering poorly documented hardware and APIs to determine if the thing I’m trying to do is even supported.
In general, yes, but I would say "experimental features" is a pretty widely used term, so in my mind the association with something user facing is strong.
I was half-joking, of course I could've just asked Claude, but the linked site shows there has been actual recent spikes in the use of the word 'spike'. The term does match what I was recently doing, but hacking around legacy ERP software, blackboxes and other enterprise abominations isn't that out of the ordinary for me.
Thanks to the infinite well of human creativity I am able to read "load-bearing" both as the intended affectation (I won't call it meaning) as as well "being full of shit".
Author here, thank you so much! I really tried to make it nice to use, beyond the (quite original) modelling.
A prototype I did tried to detect some grammatical constructions, eg "it's not ..., it's ...", but I am not sure how to systematize that.
Also just a disclaimer: I am NOT tracking Claude tics, I am merely finding that a particular cluster of vocabulary increases. Tracking Claude requires labelled data IMO. I tried using model release dates in a structural model to constraint the clusters but the result was not compelling, so I ended up simplifying the model a lot!
I love this. I think you should be clearer about that - it's obvious to people who have experience doing this kind of data analysis, but a lot of people I've shown this were confused, as in "huh, load-bearing and genuinely makes sense but how'd he pick all these other words!?"
I think it should be made clear that the sorting is sort of Texas Sharpshooter-ish - the ones on top are on top because they sort that way.
The fact that load-bearing ends up on top is the proof that this works because we all know a priori that load-bearing is a Claudism.
I find Claude language often hard to process and having to wade through these words can be draining. Embarrassingly, I’ve recently caught myself using them in conversations! Do all models have the their own jargon?
I swear claude took a detour recently, its written output has been nearly incomprehensible to me. At first i thought i was getting AI-brained and just lost critical thinking but as i dug into response after response its was just the most obtuse language to explain what was going on. Really mentally taxing to wade through it all day.
It’s bad enough that I’ve told Claude never to write cleverly and never to use metaphors. Opus 5 mostly ignores those kinds of instructions, annoyingly enough.
I've noticed ChatGPT these days often starts a response with "Yes." when it doesn't actually make sense to do so, and sometimes says "and" where "but" seems more appropriate (or vice-versa).
Depends what you mean by "upstream". It would probably be inefficient to force the model to use more human-readable wording in its internal thinking traces, while translating a block of text at the end is a pretty trivial task for an LLM.
Author here! Grateful for the kind words, human communities like HN really hit differently when you spend the whole day chatting with sycophantic and bullshitting agents (including to make this page).
I'm currently adding a search bar as well as increasing the data to 1000 PR per day.
A nice thing that is not obvious on the main page is that the dataset and analysis are updated daily using Github Actions (at least when they don't suffer from an outage ^^). I find it pretty cool to be able to build such apps without a "backend"!
Nice work. I would suggest rewriting your README with Gemini, the most human of them, so it doesn't read exactly like the thing you are pointing at: https://github.com/louisabraham/load-bearing
Agree with rewriting with Gemini, but I'd characterize its output as very "neutral" and "encyclopedic", rather than "human" (contra Claude which is as of recent models "trying-too-hard-to-be-human"-sounding).
Very cool! I'm trying to understand the graph, so the bottom-most section seems to be the cluster identifying Claude written PRs. What are the other 7, any reason there are 8 in total?
I've been scraping instagram posts recently to identify AI misinformation accounts that all repost each other's carousels and get hundreds of thousands of likes in engagement. Thinking of ways to present it and your dashboard looks very helpful. Did you experiment with any other types of visualizations before deciding on a stacked area chart for the clusters?
The design is really impressive. Beautiful and dense, yet very understandable.
How did you come up with this particular design? It's really nice and everything fits, the colors, the layout, all of it.
Were you inspired by anything in particular? I feel like this reminds me of something, but I don't remember what exactly.
I agree with you, I really like OP's design choices, even more so amidst the flood of Claude-Generic these days. Although Claude just can't resist those little muted-toned ui-monospace small-caps...
It reminds me of Neue Grafik/Swiss Style, and Vignelli:
I asked Claude for a few original designs, then iterated a lot for the UI. It called this design "Rasterfeld", which is a word that means "field of grids", a term used in swiss design https://docs.mew.design/blog/swiss-design-style/ as @alwa said.
The 3 primary colors refer more to pop art and Bauhaus.
I'm really eager for a nice book about "design" that would document all those styles, if someone has a recommendation.
I added the search bar, increased the data to 1000 PR a day (more than 50M words total) and added a feature to explore the other clusters as well. I hope the page is not getting cluttered.
I really love this. It’s comprehensive, it consolidates the data to the point where the argument effectively ‘makes itself’, and the way it’s presented respects the reader’s time. It also makes for an interesting challenge (for me at least) to try to characterise the subject matter of a language problem so narrowly.
No ream of slides. No narrative. Just a lovely big painful conclusion.
What argument? I don't know what to take away other than "Claude likes certain words". Some of them are kind of amusing, but I'm not convinced the vocabulary is bad or that this is a problem, just from looking at this.
The word selection and way of writing has taken the joy out of using Claude.
I understand it's not active yet, and when it will be, it should only nudge the chances between choices that are anyway likely and are already randomized today via temperature.
Watermarking is not the reason Claude talks like that.
I understand there are other reasons (overdone RLHF, for example) why claude is wedged into this weird way of writing that takes the joy out of conversing with it, but this is one as well.
The meaning of the words it uses can be oh so close, but the popularity of the words are not, and not in that context -- but the use of these other words changes the context ever so slightly, and then it uses other words where those words would work better.
I had something in code that related to people over time periods, and once it switches to a vacuous word choice, i found it starting talking using all ERP terms. I had to google the whole sentence to understand that, individual words were fine they just didn't make any sense to me.
You need a PhD to understand its explanation of a code snippet.
I am not sure whether it's a consequence of learning to reason from its traces or some RLHF that trips it into using weird terms to sound smarter to the humans who rate it.
"The fibred side folded its capstone into the existing name, so the kinds are asymmetric."
What on earth does it mean to fold a capstone into a name‽
So there's a "fibred side".. the most likely candidate seems to be "fibred categories" which I hadn't heard of before, and it's talking about one side of some mapping between two sets such that if f is the primary function and f(x)=y then there exists an inverse function g(y)=x? Was it something that converted some data bidirectionally with a different algorithm on both sides?
The capstone of the inverse function would be the most important thing about it maybe?
My best guess is "In the process of working on the inverse function, the existing name (of the inverse function itself maybe?) was made to reflect the operation of the inverse function, so now the name does not follow the same naming convention as the name of the primary function (which does not contain its 'capstone')."
Its original wording is certainly dense and harder to follow for us, but it's fascinating how the model finds this the best fit for what it's trying to express IMO. Like it arrives at its own ways of overloading words/concepts, and things we would refer to in different ways in different contexts all get compressed to the same more-useful/complete idea.
Codex has never said anything nearly so alien as the Claude examples I've seen floating around, interestingly. I wonder if it just has a better training on choosing its words to present to the user or if it inherently arrived at a somewhat different mapping that favors 'plain language' more.
As far as I can tell "the capstone" is what Claude usually calls my current goal if it thinks it is a satisfying result.
I have several similar folders with variants of a construction, but taking differently structured input. They are named “plain”, “fibred” and “indexed”. So the fibred variant is clear enough.
The Claude speak I struggle with is “the capstone” and what name it could be talking about. And what folding means here. I think it just means:
“I changed an important result of the construction in the fibred variant, but kept the name. so the fibred variant is now different from the others.”
My intuition is that Claude is trained to communicate to itself while coding. You see this in how bizarrely granular it is when explanation prior work, you also see this in the comments it leaves behinds.
https://www.bullshitgenerator.com/
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
1. Adds a small prompt to each turn with the agent[1]. 2. Is like a band-aid on a bullet wound, properly solving it would mean retraining the model and they probably are already working on it.
[1] https://x.com/_can1357/status/2090360068529111530
Does anyone have an output style nailed down that actually works? If so, please share!
alwayshasbeen.jpg
Naively I would often expect it would talk to me about various niche topics like to a layman, which does occur about some topics an actual normal person would ask.
I’ve noticed that Sol is pretty good most of the time, but with long contexts it’ll start to devolve into Claudish.
I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...". I started to notice I was using this pattern quite a bit somewhat recently, but I took a quick look at some of my social media posts and realized it's been occurring for a while. I had realized that I grown accustomed to this kind of language because, especially early on, LLMs would focus too much on the specific examples I'd provide when, really, I was just trying to give them a sense of what I was looking for. I just picked up that providing two examples then adding the "etc." worked to get the LLM to not focus so much on the specific examples and to understand that they need to consider more than what I explicitly presented. Of course, now I write like that in my social media comments, in Slack with my colleagues, etc. :>
I'd be interested to see if anyone can identify trends like this, since I think the human-language component of the adoption of LLMs is probably being somewhat neglected despite probably being surely dramatically affected.
Thank you for the compliment! I did spend a lot of time designing a nice experience on both desktop and mobile. Even the scrollbar to select words was non trivial as I wanted the words to be of different size, yet avoid flickering when scrolling!
Basically when scrolling, the frame around words will have a stable top edge to avoid flickering, and it took me a few iterations to make it work.
I tested multiple designs, some of them inspired by word clouds and the size variation stuck afterwards.
One very minor note: if your scroll device reports pixel-perfect deltas rather than discrete scroll-wheel ticks (e.g. logitech mx master, laptop touchpad, etc), the behaviour in the word search box is a bit weird. Arrow keys work fine though.
I did test it with my mac touchpad without issue. Maybe the problem is that I wanted to make discrete scroll-wheel ticks work. I just tried a fix by normalising deltaMode to pixels.
If you could just paste this in your console, I would have a better idea:
> Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World
I was focused on the data initially scrolling through until I suddenly realised, wow, this is really nice!
I am the proud owner of several seams, and am considering giving them person-names. The empty space between my inventory APIs and their clients might be “Karen”.
I can’t say that Claude invented this; the same type of terminology cycling happens every few quarters based on what leadership is reading/being told by Gartner.
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/LegacySeam.html
Claude is using it a bit liberally, but not totally incorrectly.
"load-bearing" I have never heard used for programming before Opus, and its incredibly annoying and over-used.
http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Ye_Flask
Seam is used liberally throughout because it captures the idea well (i.e. a place where you can cleave ball of mud code apart to begin refactoring efforts in an isolated way) and that takes many different forms throughout the book whether that be via methods and classes, source files as a single unit, linker seams, on and on.
"load-bearing" on the other hand is just a weird way to say "required" or "prerequisite" without drawing any attention to the fact that one cannot articulate what something is a prerequisite for, probably because that fact has since been lost from context.
The kind of quirks you see came from crowd-sourced human-in-the-loop fine-tuning, with not very good work conditions or level of qualification (so resulting in "what non-writers thought good writing looked like", before people had developed the flair to detect these patterns) as well as feedback loops during agentic reinforcement learning and RLVR.
I'm already seeing it. A coworker said something like "<person> added the color to the ticket here" meaning that someone added details to a ticket.
I've started seeing Opus 5 talk about "hermetic testing" when it just means "unit testing", so I hope that doesn't catch on...
"Load bearing", not so much. Ick.
The problem is once a fun phrase is, uh, coloured by "Claude" or some other LLM, it just turns to AI slop.
Or we'll do the opposite and even deliberately use some words that an LLM would never use to identify whose content is worth reading?
Why would you consider using lists an "LLM" language thing? I really don't understand this concept. Like even this project, the top words I can see are:
1. load-bearing 2. plainly 3. quietly 4. refusal 5. survived
How are they LLM words? I used them all the time before ChatGPT was a thing.
Like if your claim is you use "etc." more because you talk to an LLM, I think you're just discovering human language, no? Like it's not a unique LLM thing that magically dropped and is now going to make people do it. It's a legit thing that most human writers have used for a long time -> which is why LLMs copy it. It's not backward.
A better claim than "people will start writing like LLMs" could be that people will become more literate in expressing themselves. But that literacy is not alien or AI to us, it is basic human language only used properly.
Granted picking apart single words outside of context doesn’t give the full picture. (well except “load bearing” which is turning into a meme at this point)
What's somewhat interesting to me is that "load-bearing" was already a common thing to say in certain communities, like lesswrong.com. Whether it breaks out from that subculture with Claude as the vector, or disappears from there because nobody wants to sound like Claude, we'll have to see. How many children are called "Elvis" these days?
So for me they are differentiated enough, but could be that I am just used to it.
I think it was subtly dissing you.
I was half-joking, of course I could've just asked Claude, but the linked site shows there has been actual recent spikes in the use of the word 'spike'. The term does match what I was recently doing, but hacking around legacy ERP software, blackboxes and other enterprise abominations isn't that out of the ordinary for me.
Is it possible to expand this analysis beyond words to other Claude ticks? Contrastive framings, sentence length, caveating, for instance.
A prototype I did tried to detect some grammatical constructions, eg "it's not ..., it's ...", but I am not sure how to systematize that.
Also just a disclaimer: I am NOT tracking Claude tics, I am merely finding that a particular cluster of vocabulary increases. Tracking Claude requires labelled data IMO. I tried using model release dates in a structural model to constraint the clusters but the result was not compelling, so I ended up simplifying the model a lot!
I think it should be made clear that the sorting is sort of Texas Sharpshooter-ish - the ones on top are on top because they sort that way.
The fact that load-bearing ends up on top is the proof that this works because we all know a priori that load-bearing is a Claudism.
I'm currently adding a search bar as well as increasing the data to 1000 PR per day.
A nice thing that is not obvious on the main page is that the dataset and analysis are updated daily using Github Actions (at least when they don't suffer from an outage ^^). I find it pretty cool to be able to build such apps without a "backend"!
I've been scraping instagram posts recently to identify AI misinformation accounts that all repost each other's carousels and get hundreds of thousands of likes in engagement. Thinking of ways to present it and your dashboard looks very helpful. Did you experiment with any other types of visualizations before deciding on a stacked area chart for the clusters?
I did experiment and a stacked chart seemed the most clear, with the important cluster at the bottom.
The design is really impressive. Beautiful and dense, yet very understandable. How did you come up with this particular design? It's really nice and everything fits, the colors, the layout, all of it.
Were you inspired by anything in particular? I feel like this reminds me of something, but I don't remember what exactly.
It reminds me of Neue Grafik/Swiss Style, and Vignelli:
https://designreviewed.com/series/neue-grafik-new-graphic-de...
https://www.printmag.com/featured/swiss-style-principles-typ...
https://www.designculture.it/interview/massimo-vignelli.html
https://andrewclark.co.uk/all-media/the-vignelli-canon
I asked Claude for a few original designs, then iterated a lot for the UI. It called this design "Rasterfeld", which is a word that means "field of grids", a term used in swiss design https://docs.mew.design/blog/swiss-design-style/ as @alwa said.
The 3 primary colors refer more to pop art and Bauhaus.
I'm really eager for a nice book about "design" that would document all those styles, if someone has a recommendation.
I added the search bar, increased the data to 1000 PR a day (more than 50M words total) and added a feature to explore the other clusters as well. I hope the page is not getting cluttered.
No ream of slides. No narrative. Just a lovely big painful conclusion.
What argument? I don't know what to take away other than "Claude likes certain words". Some of them are kind of amusing, but I'm not convinced the vocabulary is bad or that this is a problem, just from looking at this.