The default style is literally marketing droid - a mix of blather, grammatical filler, folksy corporate pretension, and SV dev speak. ('And here's why that matters.' Things 'landing' through 'gates', abstractions having a 'shape', and so on.)
You can wrangle it into something more interesting with shaping and filtering passes, and you can also ask for styles of dead people. (It gets annoyed if you ask for the living.)
That can take you surprisingly far. But most people accept the first thing they get, which is why you see the same style everywhere.
Part of the problem is that AI has been trained on all text, not just the internet but scientific papers and books of all varieties. AI style is almost certainly the average of that style approach but we use very different styles for different writing and getting it wrong grates, and AI doesn't seem to deal with these style differences well at all.
Thats the training data, but i dont think thats the biggest factor in the tone. I think its the RLHF. This thing has been guided by silicon valley techbros so it tlaks like them. Even claudes latest style of trying to cram as much information into as little space as possible by nouning verbs and just creating adhoc jargon, is how alot engineers (including me) actually talk. I think they just guided it towards that and overfit on it
Marketing folks talked like that, for almost my entire career (it was basically a meme), which wound up, as AI was coming into its own.
You’re absolu —— okay I will see myself out now.
I recently found a programming task it really sucks at: trying to make a texture from normal house pictures and apply that to a 3D house model.
The default style is literally marketing droid - a mix of blather, grammatical filler, folksy corporate pretension, and SV dev speak. ('And here's why that matters.' Things 'landing' through 'gates', abstractions having a 'shape', and so on.)
You can wrangle it into something more interesting with shaping and filtering passes, and you can also ask for styles of dead people. (It gets annoyed if you ask for the living.)
That can take you surprisingly far. But most people accept the first thing they get, which is why you see the same style everywhere.
Part of the problem is that AI has been trained on all text, not just the internet but scientific papers and books of all varieties. AI style is almost certainly the average of that style approach but we use very different styles for different writing and getting it wrong grates, and AI doesn't seem to deal with these style differences well at all.
Thats the training data, but i dont think thats the biggest factor in the tone. I think its the RLHF. This thing has been guided by silicon valley techbros so it tlaks like them. Even claudes latest style of trying to cram as much information into as little space as possible by nouning verbs and just creating adhoc jargon, is how alot engineers (including me) actually talk. I think they just guided it towards that and overfit on it
Another Torment Nexus taken from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Genuine People Personality is real.
I'm sad that the em dash has been appropriated by clankers. It was a part of my tone, which I used often in writing.
Not to be contrarian but there’s also a lot to like in it. Load bearing is a good word and I hope it wins the memetic lottery and becomes common.
A lot of arguments do boil down to one specific “load bearing” one and I’m glad I learned vocabulary to express this thing from Claude
I think we can find better words. Structural, maybe. Or even just: important.
Load-bearing feels like an unnecessary analogy.
“Load bearing”
“Here’s the part no one is talking about”