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teiferer • today at 11:06 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

Enumerating 3 things really ..sparks a comment nowadays? Doing that as a rhetorical device has been a thing for generations and of course LLMs mimic it because it is everywhere in their training data.

I just heard a quick J. Talarico speech at some country concert. In the 10 or so sentences he spoke, he had 3 or 4 instances of doing this "Claudism" enumeration. Are you saying Texas just elected Claude for Senate?

Maybe we should stop with such superficial judgements. It's the modern equivalent of not liking the speaker's tie. (Doesn't mean the speaker's speech is good, but it doesn't mean it's bad either.)


Replies

fxwin • today at 11:35 AM

There are more Claude-isms in there than just rule of three (Hence -isms and not -ism), and while I'd generally agree that we generally shouldn't be superficial with our judgements, this particular heuristic has served me pretty well so far. I don't know what Talarico speech you are talking about, so i won't comment on that (But I'm not sure if political speeches are the best rebuttal to "I think obviously AI generated text is an indicator of low signal-to-noise ratio").

Edit re "equivalent to not liking the speaker's tie": This is not equivalent at all, this is a written blog post and I'm put off by the way it is written, not by say the URL or their chosen font. It's more akin to a speaker dropping an inappropriate joke at the start of their talk and leaving because of that

lemagedurage • today at 11:27 AM

I think it's the combination of the profound writing style with the underwhelming substance that bothers people.

quietbritishjim • today at 12:40 PM

"Why XYZ still wins" is also a very common pattern for Claude. Granted it's also found in pre-Claude clickbait titles.

IshKebab • today at 12:29 PM

Speeches have always over-used these writing techniques. The problem is Claude uses them all the time, even when not writing speeches.