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salvozappa 7 hours ago [-]
Anthropic's public writing style is very different from Claude's because it's written by humans. Even in their job ads they ask candidates to not use AI for any writing (or at least they used to).
a34729t 49 minutes ago [-]
The first rule of drug dealers: Don't use your own drug!
hirako2000 5 hours ago [-]
Makes sense. Steve jobs didn't let his kid touch apple devices.
I find the language of "collaborating with Claude" off-putting. I don't collaborate with Claude, I use Claude. It's a tool in my hands, not a colleague or a friend.
michaelt 7 hours ago [-]
AI companies seem eager to perpetuate the fantasy that all users carefully review all LLM output, and supervise all tool calls.
Anthropic certainly isn't planning to take responsibility for Claude's mistakes - that's the user's responsibility. Describing everything as 'collaborating' is I think part of their efforts to emphasise the user's role in the process.
einszwei 6 hours ago [-]
I think the opposite. AI Companies use the term collaborate to increase the trust in the LLM output.
I trust the output of colleagues I am collaborating with and have an assumption of some shared responsibility. But if I use a tool like numpy/matplotlib then I am accountable for the conclusions I come up with. I can't make an excuse that "matplotlib" created a plot so my decisions were incorrect and not due to my own negligence.
cyanydeez 6 hours ago [-]
If that were true, they'd cut their token gen speed and reduce all prices to th level their users could actually read what it produces.
DuperPower 4 hours ago [-]
dont you collaborate with your toaster to make breakfast
nisegami 5 hours ago [-]
I have the opposite view point, "collaborating with Claude" is I think how I would best describe that experience.
butlike 3 hours ago [-]
Do you collaborate with your keyboard on the spreadsheet? The prosaic prompting is an I/O device to a machine.
JSR_FDED 7 hours ago [-]
I’ve read the link, but I don’t get how it’s relevant to the OP’s point that Anthropic public communications don’t sound like Claude. Can you enlighten me?
simonw 6 hours ago [-]
Because it's the most clear indication Anthropic have given of policies around AI writing with respect to their own company.
Things like:
> Not allowed:
Prompt: "Write my answers to the application questions for an AI safety researcher position at Anthropic." Result: Generic content with experiences you haven't actually had
I haven't seen other policy documents from them that are as relevant to the question anywhere else.
gjvc 7 hours ago [-]
why do you care?
JSR_FDED 7 hours ago [-]
Because Simon usually posts interesting comments.
Do I need a different reason?
toasty228 7 hours ago [-]
Same reason the tech execs kids aren't using the tools created by their parents
stavros 6 hours ago [-]
You think Tim Cook's kids don't use iPhones? Or that Larry Ellison's kids don't use Oracle Financial Services Adaptive Intelligence Foundation for Anti Money Laundering Application?
lemming 5 hours ago [-]
Steve Jobs famously didn't let his kids use iPads (and restricted their access to tech pretty heavily, it seems). If you watch the Social Dilemma, it's full of people who invented what we consider fundamental tech, but don't let their families use any of it because they can see the problems it causes. It makes the techno-optimism ring pretty hollow.
xdertz 5 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't let kids use a sharp kitchen knife either, but it is still something that everyone benefits from owning.
weird-eye-issue 3 hours ago [-]
But do we really benefit from smartphones?
revolvingthrow 1 hours ago [-]
As usual, smartphones are an excellent servant but a terrible master. Having a phone, a music player, web browser, camera, gps all in one tiny package? Incredible. Having a machine that lets me doom scroll tiktok for 10 hours straight? Awful.
Same deal with internet, ai, even alcohol. Plenty of benefits with a side risk of ruining your life / brain / life if you lack self control.
hagbard_c 2 hours ago [-]
Depends how 'we' use them. Society as a whole probably does not benefit because of the severe drawbacks these devices have for those who can't resist the lure of 'social' media and garbage factories like TikTok. Individuals can certainly benefit from having an internet-connected pocket computer which so happens to also be capable of making and receiving phone calls.
chucksta 2 hours ago [-]
Is it a net benefit to the user or a consistently equal transaction?
hagbard_c 27 minutes ago [-]
For some - like me - it is certainly a net benefit since there is no real transaction other than me buying the hardware and paying ~€2/month for mobile data/cell service:
- the device is 'Google-free'
- I only use free software
- the thing is firewalled for in- and outgoing traffic, only those applications I approve get to access the net
- I use a 'prepaid' data card, 250 GB valid for 2 years for ~€50 (~€2/month) which I won't use up. Last time I could take along unused data to the next 2 years so nothing is lost.
Here's the 'costs':
- between €120 and €170 for the hardware which tends to last around 8 years, i.e. between €15 and ~€21 per year
- sometimes something breaks (battery, screen, speaker, USB connection board) which I then repair, can be anything between €1 and €40 so let's put the repair costs at €24 per device or €3 per year
- €2/month for data and cell service valid in the whole EU (no roaming costs)
- electricity, comes from the sun -> free
- when the device is on I can be tracked by interested TLAs like any other 4/5G device
- same is true for Bluetooth, not so much for WiFi which is normally off and changes MAC address for every connection.
stavros 5 hours ago [-]
Let's not conflate "this technology isn't for kids" with "this technology is bad", though. I wouldn't want my kids using a tablet, but I wouldn't want anyone using a gun.
PunchyHamster 4 hours ago [-]
don't use != not allowed to use, pretty sure they use them now
ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago [-]
Related:
Silicon Valley Executives Are Tech Fans. Just Not for Their Kids
Other than the specific phrases like load-bearing etc, I find the biggest tell of all just to be repetition.
Every damn Claude article does the “tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what you told ‘em” routine.
BoredomIsFun 6 hours ago [-]
Stiff, repetive style is often a result of very small, less than 0.5 sampling temperature, very small top-k, very high min-p etc. Most of "normies" (wrt to /r/localllama and /r/sillytavernai) never tweak the samplers.
weird-eye-issue 3 hours ago [-]
You must not be doing much real work with these models, otherwise you would know that with the latest Claude models you can't even adjust the temperature or top p/k
The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters
BoredomIsFun 2 hours ago [-]
> You must not be doing much real work with these models, otherwise you would know that with the latest Claude models you can't even adjust the temperature or top p/k
No, I do not. Good for me I guess.
> The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters
I've spent my spare time in the last _days_ rewriting a pretty small document made in collaboration with Fable. It was reluctant to simplify the proposed design. And the language is so dense - it's almost poetic in nature and concision, but I wanted a clear discourse about a complex topic with people whose native language is not English.
It's an interesting model/tool. Powerful but still chock full of trade-offs. I hope the next model's language is more like e.g. OpenAI models in terms of language use. (oh, and the code comments, yikes).
PatronBernard 4 hours ago [-]
Claude Code's creative use of language in an engineering context is often quite infuriating. I want language to be as simple as possible, it should be accessible and require as little context as possible. Below are a few examples that Code wrote that I encountered in my own work (related to signal processing):
"excursion"
(means: a spike/jump — a value that rises or deviates from baseline, just say spike or outlier)
"legitimate majority-normal baseline"
(means: a real majority of normal pixels)
"matched pool of pure-noise ('normal') pixels"
(means: the same number of normal pixels, don't bring pools into this)
"ablation"
(means: comparing before vs. after — turning a thing on/off to see what changes)
I actually used Claude Code to try and find examples like these but not entirely unexpectedly it had a very hard time detecting these, even though I encounter them like every other sentence. I can imagine this style is great when writing prose, not so much when writing documentation.
Similarly, I tried using Claude Design to make some slides, and the individual slides were fine, but just about every other slide it used different words to denote the same concept, which I would say is the fastest way to lose your audience.
esperent 5 hours ago [-]
> wanted a clear discourse about a complex topic with people whose native language is not English.
Did you try specifically telling it that? I haven't used Fable but I do write lots of docs for a non native audience and I get good results from stating that.
miranaproarrow 8 hours ago [-]
Ive given up trying to fight claudes language, and Im afraid Im getting used to it and can even understand what claude is saying faster or should I say I can parse it faster now.
miranaproarrow 8 hours ago [-]
gate= some sort of a guard or test
name= a variable name or fields
load bearing= coupled dependencies that can break other things if you change it
alex43578 6 hours ago [-]
While these are clunky, was this phraseology that much of a problem for people? I don't like reading it, but I didn't find that I couldn't read it.
hombre_fatal 5 hours ago [-]
But slowing down to decipher text instead of single pass simple reading is the problem.
Random example from a session I have open:
> *One new failure mode the doubling opens, and how it is closed.* A ring never shrinks. With two 8-byte index words per record instead of one, the ring's doubling comes inside the budget's reach in the blank regime: a doubling taken [...]
It takes extra deciphering cycles to see "the doubling", "budget's reach", "the blank regime", etc. and figure out what it's referring to. I had to read that opening sentence multiple times. At first I parsed it like "One cat the table yawns".
Sometimes it's so encumbered I can't tell what it's saying at the directional level: good or bad, fast or slow? "Your blank regime negated the pre-armed run's dilemma but clawed back the overall metrics."
It's not how I'd phrase things if I were trying to be easily understood, though Claudese is probably great for LLMs due to ad hoc jargon usage.
alex43578 5 hours ago [-]
Oh yeah, those examples are gibberish. Mine hasn't been that bad. More like the comment I responded to, where it's just being a bit clunky. Your examples read like Claude's gone a bit schizo.
SkyPuncher 3 hours ago [-]
I get tripped up on the intensity of its us and the ambiguity it tends to apply them with.
Minor inconvenience != load bearing, yet Claude consistently uses it while missing actual loading bearing things.
Likewise, it tends to jump to terminology that’s technically correct but practically meaningless.
PunchyHamster 4 hours ago [-]
just seeing it too often I'd imagine. I don't really mind it
StilesCrisis 4 hours ago [-]
pinned = forced in some way
tree is green = tests built and ran without error
landed = surprisingly, not "made a commit" but rather "finished the code." It might be confused because we're using Perforce and not git.
thih9 5 hours ago [-]
invariant = constant
you were right to push back = previous response was wrong
knollimar 5 hours ago [-]
Load bearing irks me having a construction background.
Claude will often comment on it using the phrase wrong when it gets context.
ricardobeat 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hombre_fatal 5 hours ago [-]
I don't see why Anthropic would be expected to publish default Claude voice or use Claude for their public writing. No matter how great AI is, it doesn't commit you to using it for everything.
And they probably know basic LLM tricks like "write it in the style of X".
When you read a blog post with Claude voice, you're seeing the result of someone who couldn't even be bothered to do that which is why they deserve extra lashings.
rossy 5 hours ago [-]
> And they probably know basic LLM tricks like "write it in the style of X".
You can probably get it to do a surface-level impression of Mark Twain that way, but from what I've heard, it's not that easy to prompt Claude out of the "voice" described in the article for technical writing, and all existing methods, like asking it to ELI5 or tropes.fyi, only have partial success.
hombre_fatal 4 hours ago [-]
For a single document like a blog post it should be easy, though you don't have to sub a famous author in for X.
There are all sorts of ways to do it though, like pointing it to an example doc.
BoredomIsFun 6 hours ago [-]
There are many different ways to make an LLM sound more human-like (the author has actually explicitly mentioned ChatGPT sounds more natural). For their public announcements etc. they might as well used specially trained small 24-32B creative writing model or put a LoRA on top of their Haiku. One could also use "antislop" samplers, maybe some encoder-decoder unslopping postprocessing small models etc. Or they simply may have been written by humans.
StilesCrisis 4 hours ago [-]
Why would they use Haiku for anything? They aren't paying for the tokens.
BoredomIsFun 4 hours ago [-]
> Why would they use Haiku for anything?
Good enough for essentially blogposts? Easier to finetune?
> They aren't paying for the tokens.
They are paying for electricity, though.
StilesCrisis 2 hours ago [-]
The electricity cost is a rounding error compared to the cost of putting out a press release which makes them look incompetent.
BoredomIsFun 50 minutes ago [-]
As I said, why would you use and finetune (burning lots of electrcity, not rounding error) Sonnet if you can cheaply tune Haiku? Press releases do not need advanced skills from LLMs.
swiftcoder 6 hours ago [-]
> or put a LoRA on top of their Haiku
Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models?
BoredomIsFun 6 hours ago [-]
> Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models?
Oddly enough standalone LoRA adapters are very popular in image generation world and utterly unpopular in LLM world - there it is customary just to distribute fully merged models on HF.
Having said that I personally use a finetune of Qwen 3.6,
Qwen3.6-27B-Fable-Fusion-711-Uncensored-Heretic, which was was not designed for creative writing per se but is far better than any other 24B-32B model I've tried for writing, let alone awful vanilla Qwen 3.6.
BOOSTERHIDROGEN 5 hours ago [-]
Interesting use case, with so many finetune available at HF, how you determine a good models?
BoredomIsFun 4 hours ago [-]
/r/localllama, /r/sillytavernai for leads and then personal vibe check.
miranaproarrow 8 hours ago [-]
whats troubling here is that one of the anthropic devs on twitter or github don't seem to acknowledge this issue, If they don't acknowledge there's nothing for them to fix
perching_aix 7 hours ago [-]
I do really enjoy the style of their blogposts, they remind me of the Cloudflare postmortems. Wish their models could produce it.
Not sure I agree about e.g. GPT not sounding this formulaic though, imo it definitely does.
I don't actually have a problem with the common terms Claude emits, I think they're appropriate for a coding agent. But I do find them overused.
redsocksfan45 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
wiradikusuma 8 hours ago [-]
On the bright side, I'll know immediately a post is Claude-generated. If the author didn't bother writing it, I don't bother reading it.
/s?
reddozen 7 hours ago [-]
This is where the concern-trolls barge in with "what about non native English speakers using AI to blogslop everything is actually a good tool!"
Anthropic certainly isn't planning to take responsibility for Claude's mistakes - that's the user's responsibility. Describing everything as 'collaborating' is I think part of their efforts to emphasise the user's role in the process.
I trust the output of colleagues I am collaborating with and have an assumption of some shared responsibility. But if I use a tool like numpy/matplotlib then I am accountable for the conclusions I come up with. I can't make an excuse that "matplotlib" created a plot so my decisions were incorrect and not due to my own negligence.
Things like:
> Not allowed: Prompt: "Write my answers to the application questions for an AI safety researcher position at Anthropic." Result: Generic content with experiences you haven't actually had
I haven't seen other policy documents from them that are as relevant to the question anywhere else.
Do I need a different reason?
Same deal with internet, ai, even alcohol. Plenty of benefits with a side risk of ruining your life / brain / life if you lack self control.
- the device is 'Google-free'
- I only use free software
- the thing is firewalled for in- and outgoing traffic, only those applications I approve get to access the net
- I use a 'prepaid' data card, 250 GB valid for 2 years for ~€50 (~€2/month) which I won't use up. Last time I could take along unused data to the next 2 years so nothing is lost.
Here's the 'costs':
- between €120 and €170 for the hardware which tends to last around 8 years, i.e. between €15 and ~€21 per year
- sometimes something breaks (battery, screen, speaker, USB connection board) which I then repair, can be anything between €1 and €40 so let's put the repair costs at €24 per device or €3 per year
- €2/month for data and cell service valid in the whole EU (no roaming costs)
- electricity, comes from the sun -> free
- when the device is on I can be tracked by interested TLAs like any other 4/5G device
- same is true for Bluetooth, not so much for WiFi which is normally off and changes MAC address for every connection.
Silicon Valley Executives Are Tech Fans. Just Not for Their Kids
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396742
Every damn Claude article does the “tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what you told ‘em” routine.
The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters
No, I do not. Good for me I guess.
> The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters
What an absurd claim.
It's an interesting model/tool. Powerful but still chock full of trade-offs. I hope the next model's language is more like e.g. OpenAI models in terms of language use. (oh, and the code comments, yikes).
"excursion" (means: a spike/jump — a value that rises or deviates from baseline, just say spike or outlier)
"legitimate majority-normal baseline" (means: a real majority of normal pixels)
"matched pool of pure-noise ('normal') pixels" (means: the same number of normal pixels, don't bring pools into this)
"ablation" (means: comparing before vs. after — turning a thing on/off to see what changes)
I actually used Claude Code to try and find examples like these but not entirely unexpectedly it had a very hard time detecting these, even though I encounter them like every other sentence. I can imagine this style is great when writing prose, not so much when writing documentation.
Similarly, I tried using Claude Design to make some slides, and the individual slides were fine, but just about every other slide it used different words to denote the same concept, which I would say is the fastest way to lose your audience.
Did you try specifically telling it that? I haven't used Fable but I do write lots of docs for a non native audience and I get good results from stating that.
name= a variable name or fields
load bearing= coupled dependencies that can break other things if you change it
Random example from a session I have open:
> *One new failure mode the doubling opens, and how it is closed.* A ring never shrinks. With two 8-byte index words per record instead of one, the ring's doubling comes inside the budget's reach in the blank regime: a doubling taken [...]
It takes extra deciphering cycles to see "the doubling", "budget's reach", "the blank regime", etc. and figure out what it's referring to. I had to read that opening sentence multiple times. At first I parsed it like "One cat the table yawns".
Sometimes it's so encumbered I can't tell what it's saying at the directional level: good or bad, fast or slow? "Your blank regime negated the pre-armed run's dilemma but clawed back the overall metrics."
It's not how I'd phrase things if I were trying to be easily understood, though Claudese is probably great for LLMs due to ad hoc jargon usage.
Minor inconvenience != load bearing, yet Claude consistently uses it while missing actual loading bearing things.
Likewise, it tends to jump to terminology that’s technically correct but practically meaningless.
tree is green = tests built and ran without error
landed = surprisingly, not "made a commit" but rather "finished the code." It might be confused because we're using Perforce and not git.
you were right to push back = previous response was wrong
Claude will often comment on it using the phrase wrong when it gets context.
And they probably know basic LLM tricks like "write it in the style of X".
When you read a blog post with Claude voice, you're seeing the result of someone who couldn't even be bothered to do that which is why they deserve extra lashings.
You can probably get it to do a surface-level impression of Mark Twain that way, but from what I've heard, it's not that easy to prompt Claude out of the "voice" described in the article for technical writing, and all existing methods, like asking it to ELI5 or tropes.fyi, only have partial success.
There are all sorts of ways to do it though, like pointing it to an example doc.
Good enough for essentially blogposts? Easier to finetune?
> They aren't paying for the tokens.
They are paying for electricity, though.
Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models?
Oddly enough standalone LoRA adapters are very popular in image generation world and utterly unpopular in LLM world - there it is customary just to distribute fully merged models on HF.
Having said that I personally use a finetune of Qwen 3.6, Qwen3.6-27B-Fable-Fusion-711-Uncensored-Heretic, which was was not designed for creative writing per se but is far better than any other 24B-32B model I've tried for writing, let alone awful vanilla Qwen 3.6.
Not sure I agree about e.g. GPT not sounding this formulaic though, imo it definitely does.
I don't actually have a problem with the common terms Claude emits, I think they're appropriate for a coding agent. But I do find them overused.
/s?