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
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.
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?
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 as as relevant to the question anywhere else.
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.
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.
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.
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/sillytavern) never tweak the samplers.
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
> 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
Have fun using web-interfaces for overpriced US models while I am getting my work done with Chinese models for a fraction of price on openrouter using API. Besides, when using API I am sure all American models, including Claude honour sampling settings.
No, they don't. That's the whole point. I've spent several hundred thousand dollars in API costs in the last few years to power my app, I think I know what I'm talking about.
> I've spent several hundred thousand dollars in API costs in the last few years to power my app
Which is kinda sad, if you've used Anthropic products, because you could get comparable performance from cheaper models for vast majority of tasks.
> No, they don't. That's the whole point.
Bad for them; do not use Anthropic then. Besides "the whole point" of conversation you have interrupted is that "low temperature and tight sampling produces stiff boring cliche prose" - which is truism, as those settings control the entropy of the output. And it is utterly irrelevant frankly if one has access to the Claude sampler through API or not; as Anthropic has apparently locked the sampler at very conservative temperature (probably as low as 0.2), there is no way to squeeze god prose out of it, as the logits have been severely messed up wrt to the actual word distribution in standard English.
They aren't even available for the new Claude models which we use extensively so I think that should tell you something. I've made over $6 million with my AI app in the last few years without worrying about temperature and other parameters. What have you done?
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).
Yes. AIs are a lot better at coding than they are at writing. I author less than 1% of the code I push these days, but still write the grand majority of emails and posts. Probably I would do it 100% human if it was high stakes and I expected it to be read by millions.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Claude Code's creative use of language in an engineering context is often quite infuriating.The below examples are not technically wrong, but they add additional overhead when trying to decipher what it actually means. I want language to be as simple as possible, it should be accessible and require as little context as possible. These were a few I encountered in my own work (related to signal processing) so far:
"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)
"ablation"
(means: comparing before vs. after — turning a thing on/off to see what changes)
I used Claude Code to try and find examples like these but not entirely unexpectedly it had a very hard time detecting these. It is able to say the same idea in a million fucking ways though.
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.
> 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.
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Do I need a different reason?
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 as as relevant to the question anywhere else.
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.
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.
Which is kinda sad, if you've used Anthropic products, because you could get comparable performance from cheaper models for vast majority of tasks.
> No, they don't. That's the whole point.
Bad for them; do not use Anthropic then. Besides "the whole point" of conversation you have interrupted is that "low temperature and tight sampling produces stiff boring cliche prose" - which is truism, as those settings control the entropy of the output. And it is utterly irrelevant frankly if one has access to the Claude sampler through API or not; as Anthropic has apparently locked the sampler at very conservative temperature (probably as low as 0.2), there is no way to squeeze god prose out of it, as the logits have been severely messed up wrt to the actual word distribution in standard English.
They aren't even available for the new Claude models which we use extensively so I think that should tell you something. I've made over $6 million with my AI app in the last few years without worrying about temperature and other parameters. What have you done?
Oh, wow.
> without worrying about temperature and other parameters.
Tells a lot about you.
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.
- 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.
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.
Silicon Valley Executives Are Tech Fans. Just Not for Their Kids
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396742
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)
"ablation" (means: comparing before vs. after — turning a thing on/off to see what changes)
I used Claude Code to try and find examples like these but not entirely unexpectedly it had a very hard time detecting these. It is able to say the same idea in a million fucking ways though.
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.