alt Hacker NewsI didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.
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I wrote a thank you message on Teams to my coworkers on a project, and half of them thought I had used AI to write it. As a professional writer in a previous life, I was astonished. Then they told me that they had never seen me write anything more than a sentence or two so naturally they assumed something relatively polished had to be AI assisted.
unfortunately load bearing is one of those things that became a claudism but has been part of my daily lexicon for decades. There are a lot of things I say regularly as part of my own vocal quirkiness that now I have to self censor.
The one Claudism I will never ever use is "synthesize". I don't even know where that came from - no one talks or writes like that - "I can synthesize that for you".
Stories like this make me want to use each AI at least briefly, so I know what to avoid writing/saying. Or maybe just do a search every couple months to find out what different AIs are known for saying too often.
Claude's affected my language in two ways. one is that, for a long time, Claude in particular responded more to feedback if I swore at it, which caused me to swear at it more. this vicious cycle generalized to the point where I now have to consciously remind myself not to swear when doing something as simple as buying a coffee or asking somebody what time it is. it was difficult to even write that sentence without throwing in an F-bomb just to emphasize the silliness of the problem.
anyway, the other way is I found it's helpful when prompting LLMs to use the same "it's not delivery, it's DiGiorno's" pattern that they're all so obsessed with. especially when the thing's misapprehended some concept, so you need to clarify. this hasn't yet generalized from the fake "conversations" I have with chatbots into my conversational style out in the real world, but the risk is fully there. (it's not an inevitability -- it's an occupational hazard.)
Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.