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I didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.
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Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.
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Sure, that's where the AI got them: the training data. These phrases and cliches were very prevalent especially in corporate "white papers" and memos and marketing materials. There was a time when "stove pipe" was a common one too, along with "silo."

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.

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This is exactly why humans invented the idea of things going in and out of style.
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Actually, AI was learning these 'AI-isms' even back in 2017/2018 (probably even earlier). I think a lot of people who just jumped on the imaginary AI bandwagon more recently don't realise the mannerisms AIs are adopting are not really new. At some point the bleed between 'you' or 'you' and AI will just become so transparent it will be obliterated, more likely than not.
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I believe you and OP are in agreement — they were saying that the 2019 book had them, therefore the terms _do_ predate AI. Your point that AI was being trained on material than is load-bearing (lol) but in agreement with OP, not contradictory.

Only mentioning because your "actually" may imply you thought you were disagreeing, when in fact it's one big happy family!

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I wrote a thank you message on Teams to my coworkers on a project, and half of them thought I had used AI to write it. As a professional writer in a previous life, I was astonished. Then they told me that they had never seen me write anything more than a sentence or two so naturally they assumed something relatively polished had to be AI assisted.
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Though I haven’t been a professional writer, I’ve been a good writer with an expansive vocabulary since high school where English was my best subject despite being a STEM maven. I hate the fact that what was previously considered an advantageous skill is now a millstone in public use. I hate having to dumb down and self—censor in order to avoid being accused of using (or being) an LLM. Even though my writing has a few repeated personal tells - certain linguistic errors that I nevertheless employ as part of my idiom (and an LLM never would) - people don’t always notice them. So, I’m forced to change my voice to deal with what’s essentially an IRL Captcha.
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When I write these days, I am more aggressive in using "I", so it's clear it's my own voice. Generally, an LLM is less prone to self-reference like that unless it's prompted to, I guess.
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Good advice though too much “I” can sound a little self-centred to my ears.

If/when AGI arrives I assume this tactic will stop working.

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unfortunately load bearing is one of those things that became a claudism but has been part of my daily lexicon for decades. There are a lot of things I say regularly as part of my own vocal quirkiness that now I have to self censor.
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I've used it since that simpsons episode

"it's a load bearing poster..."

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I'm pretty sure that's not the source for me but most of my vocal quirks have origin stories like this so it's entirely possible. They're almost always things that I heard which either amused me or I thought sounded cool at the time and just stuck with me.
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The one Claudism I will never ever use is "synthesize". I don't even know where that came from - no one talks or writes like that - "I can synthesize that for you".
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Stories like this make me want to use each AI at least briefly, so I know what to avoid writing/saying. Or maybe just do a search every couple months to find out what different AIs are known for saying too often.
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Or if confronted just say you were using it first, and Claude must have copied you.
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Claude's affected my language in two ways. one is that, for a long time, Claude in particular responded more to feedback if I swore at it, which caused me to swear at it more. this vicious cycle generalized to the point where I now have to consciously remind myself not to swear when doing something as simple as buying a coffee or asking somebody what time it is. it was difficult to even write that sentence without throwing in an F-bomb just to emphasize the silliness of the problem.

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.)

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Exactly this. For whatever reason, Claude likes to talk about the "shape" of "load-bearing" "seams," but if that's the internal jargon it needs to plan and execute its work, who am I to judge?

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."

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Whenever I use AI generated content in direct communication - ie slack, email, jira tickets, etc, I always prefix any AI content with an obvious label: 'Claude says' or 'AI analysis: ' etc. In some cases I get claude to update jira tickets (really nice use case btw) with testing notes, I make sure the team knows that any notes in that format come from the AI based on the related commits.

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.

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Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.
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Your tells, are just someone’s good writing now in the training set. It’ll be a moving target with each model.

I use the humanize skill to clean up AI written work before handing it over to colleagues.

https://github.com/blader/humanizer

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If the next generation of AI content produced no recognizable LLM patterns, and was indistinguishable from an actual human author, would you still care and try to determine whether the content was AI produced?
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Of course. The "content" is how humans communicate with each other, it doesn't just exist for its own sake (except in some degenerate cases). If you know that a human has authored it, you can infer their intent and thought-process from various choices they made across it. There's no such thing as intentional choices when the content is generated though.
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I’ve asked essentially the same question many times to many people, the short answer is “yes” because it’s a matter of ideology not logic for them.

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

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I would like to know if text is LLM generated even if I can't tell from the content itself. For me it's a matter of attention (hah) and a quality signal. The poster expects to spend a minimal amount of effort on the post, and all the readers will have to spend the same amount of attention whether its LLM generated or not.

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.

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I want to know when I'm consuming AI content because the source of information matters. I want to know what was at stake for the author, what motives they had and didn't have, what biases I should be aware of, and, for example, whether I'm reading content farmed slop that exists solely to attract ad impressions.
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You still won’t know even if it’s labeled though. Someone could put an incredible amount of effort into writing something, not be satisfied with some aspect, and have an LLM refactor it for example. Now you’ve got a lot of em dashes and you issue a shallow dismissal.

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.

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It causes problems to outsource core parts of your work to someone else, even without AI. So yeah I still care.
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> hen 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.

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.

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Honestly--and I say this as a flesh-and-blood human--I continue to be pissed off that AI has ruined load-bearing parts of my vocabulary. You're absolutely right that it's starting to trigger me when I read random blog posts and come across these linguistic ticks, but I can't help but be resentful. Humans invented language and now robots are coopting it.
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I'd love it if companies had to disclose the percent of Private Equity ownership and online work disclosed the percent of AI creation.
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If you rework a paragraph in a tight loop - you change a few words, the chatbot changes a few words, going round four or five times until you've got something you're happy with, I don't see how it's meaningful to assign a percentage.

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".

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It's going to be more difficult to distinguish as humans are now using those terms.
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Yep, I've heard humans use load-bearing twice in the past week, versus approximately never in a software eng context before that.
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I agree, though as a side note I'm very curious to see how models will begin steering _our_ language. If you have popular models repeating "load-bearing" to every developer, eventually I imagine developers (especially junior developers who may not know that it's a Claudism) will begin to repeat it.
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load bearing, key insight, push back, “it’s not x, it’s y”
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