Claude writes like a guy at a firm I used to work with in the 90s; he was my employer's "visionary"; he'd worked at a whole lot of different companies on both sides of the Atlantic in inexplicably high-placed roles given that he was often bluffing, and was considered a lucky hire of a rising star. He'd be called into meetings with high end clients to spout off. He really needed you to know he understood, but very often he didn't.

I think it's likely that LLMs adopt the tone and style of their developers' communication culture. If you assume this is the case, you can infer quite a bit about the differences between OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

I am more and more clear about this given the way Muse Glimmer writes. Like a talented, slightly snarky guy who is maybe a bit of a dick but quite fun to be around.

It's not poetic or highly expressive; it's business cruft.

I asked some AI-using compatriots a while back who were complaining about this, 'isn't it doubling down on bullshitting you?' and got some pushback along the lines of 'it isn't a person therefore doesn't have dark motives like that therefore can't be doing that to us'.

Didn't convince me. I think bullshitting like this can be a behavior, not just the intention of a human. If it's blowing a lot of smoke to use fancy words and phrasings (and semicolons! All the trimmings) it's fair to ask if it's systemically bullshitting you: i.e. the behavior is meant to have you shut up and trust it and not ask questions.

Who's driving that is still important: if the company's directing it to do that in system prompts that are adversarial to users, that's a big yikes. If it's an epiphenomenon of the company demanding it get ever smarter, maybe it's a sign that their demands are not having that result, rather they're making it bullshit more explicitly and mimic more 'smart' signifiers.