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.
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.
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 are as relevant to the question anywhere else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
> 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. Nobody besides you is talking about web interfaces
Meanwhile you clearly have zero clue what you are talking about because a simple Google search would show you otherwise but that must be too difficult for you
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
Makes sense. Steve jobs didn't let his kid touch apple devices.
The first rule of drug dealers: Don't use your own drug!
The phrase is, "don't get high on your own supply."
One of the Ten AI Commandments.
Anthropic's guide for job applicants on how you should use Claude when applying for a job there is relevant here: https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance
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.
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.
dont you collaborate with your toaster to make breakfast
I have the opposite view point, "collaborating with Claude" is I think how I would best describe that experience.
Not collaborating with Claude but searching and using all the data stolen by it.
Do you collaborate with your keyboard on the spreadsheet? The prosaic prompting is an I/O device to a machine.
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 are as relevant to the question anywhere else.
why do you care?
Because Simon usually posts interesting comments.
Do I need a different reason?
Same reason the tech execs kids aren't using the tools created by their parents
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.
I wouldn't let kids use a sharp kitchen knife either, but it is still something that everyone benefits from owning.
But do we really benefit from smartphones?
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.
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.
Is it a net benefit to the user or a consistently equal transaction?
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.
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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.
don't use != not allowed to use, pretty sure they use them now
Related:
Silicon Valley Executives Are Tech Fans. Just Not for Their Kids
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396742
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.
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.
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
Wrong: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb0...
Nice slop
You are flaunting your inability/unwillingness to use sampler settings.
What?
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?
> I've made over $6 million with my AI app in the last few years
Oh, wow.
> without worrying about temperature and other parameters.
Tells a lot about you.
> 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
What an absurd claim.
Have fun toying around with your local models and leave the real work to the rest of us buddy
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. Nobody besides you is talking about web interfaces
Meanwhile you clearly have zero clue what you are talking about because a simple Google search would show you otherwise but that must be too difficult for you
> 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.
You are dumber than a rock
You are dumber thanme
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
just seeing it too often I'd imagine. I don't really mind it
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.
invariant = constant
you were right to push back = previous response was wrong
Load bearing irks me having a construction background.
Claude will often comment on it using the phrase wrong when it gets context.
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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. 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> or put a LoRA on top of their Haiku
Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models?
> 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.
Interesting use case, with so many finetune available at HF, how you determine a good models?
/r/localllama, /r/sillytavernai for leads and then personal vibe check.
Why would they use Haiku for anything? They aren't paying for the tokens.
> 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.
The electricity cost is a rounding error compared to the cost of putting out a press release which makes them look incompetent.
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.
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
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.
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?
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!"
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I mean, don't other people bail out of stuff that in slop style?
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