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  • This actually makes me think about what kind of material these companies actually used to train the models. I remember watching a video from Andrej Karapathy and him telling that in OpenAI they used subject matter experts to refine the training material for earlier versions of ChatGPT.

    I wonder even if normal people don’t talk, write like that, the subject matter experts or the professionals in their respective fields talk/write like that though

  • That's what I like most about codex, it has the 'pragmatic' tone mode which basically makes it tone-less. If claude's tone was the only one available I would seriously consider not even using LLMs or switching to a career that didn't require it because I literally can't stand interacting with it's personality for many hours each day.
    by qoez
  • "AI writing has this strange obsession with making every sentence flow beautifully into the next one. Real people don't do that."

    If we care, we bloody try!

    by dofm
  • One thing that works quite well for me for a couple of model generations now is to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English, something along the lines of

      **Use controlled technical English.** Prefer an ASD-STE100 style: use short sentences, direct terms, active voice, and one idea per sentence; avoid slang, hype, vague pronouns, and unnecessary jargon.
    
    in your agents.md. The concept of STE100 seems sufficiently ingrained in the models to eliminate 90% of the annoying fluff.
  • I don't use LLMs a whole lot, mostly for research, but personally I'm more bothered by the prompting than by the responses. After years of randomly receiving (now less frequent) incorrect answers, I've gotten used to preempting obvious but wrong trains of thought: "I need X. It's not Y." When I forget to do this and the reply is incorrect, sometimes I'm too lazy to reprompt, so I'll just write back "It's not Y" and it'll answer "wow omg you're so absolutely right, Y is not X!!! here's X instead."

    This wasn't great, but then I started catching myself writing "It's not Y" responses to colleagues on Teams. I'm pretty sure I've caught all of these and never actually sent them (I did go and review a few chat logs recently and found no such sent message), but my point is that despite my relatively light LLM usage, I am "LLM-conditioned." The abyss stares back. There could be a lot of deeply "LLM-brained" people out there.

  • If you’d have told me this breathless post. Talking about being tired about the AI tone.

    Punctuated like this.

    Was then AI tone…

    Then I’d have believed you.

  • > Nobody talks like this in real life.

    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.

  • > Have it rewrite your terrible first draft.

    > Have it fix your grammar.

    > Have it make your argument clearer.

    > Have it turn your 2,000-word ramble into something people can actually read.

    Please don't do this, and then try to "put some of yourself back into it".

    By all means, use AI to find bugs. But don't let it write a single word. Let it tell you what's wrong, then you can fix it and iterate.

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