[snowmobile]

> That 20ms is a smoking gun - it lines up perfectly with the mysterious pattern we saw earlier!

Speaking of smoking guns, anybody else reckon Claude overuses that term a lot? Seems anytime I give it some debugging question, it'll claim some random thing like a version number or whatever, is a "smoking gun"

[eieio]

Yes! While this post was written entirely by me, I wouldn't be surprised if I had "smoking gun" ready to go because I spent so much time debugging with Claude last night.

[rubslopes]

It's interesting how LLMs influence us, right? The opposite happened to me: I loved using em dashes, but AI ruined it for me.

[jabwd]

Serious question though, since AI seems to be so all capable and intelligent. Why wouldn't it be able to tell you the exact reason that I could tell you just by reading the title of this post on HN? It is failing even at the one thing it could probably do decently, is being a search engine.

[gf000]

Reminds me of ethimology nerd's videos. He has some content about how LLMs will influence human language.

[yread]

ChatGPT too. And "lines up perfectly" when it doesnt actually line up with anything

[dave78]

Same with Gemini.

[locallost]

I chuckled out loud. It's funny cause it's true.

[redwall_hp]

"You're so right, that nice catch lines up perfectly!"

[observationist]

Or the "Eureka! That's not just a smoking gun, it's a classic case of LLMspeak."

Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude all have these tics, and even the pro versions will use their signature phrases multiple times in an answer. I have to wonder if it's deliberate, to make detecting AI easier?

[WesolyKubeczek]

A computational necromancer has likely figured out a way to power a data center by making Archimedes spin in his grave very fast.

[Telemakhos]

I've love to delve into that.

https://pshapira.net/2024/03/31/delving-into-delve/

[bdamm]

Without knowing how LLM's personality tuning works, I'd just hazard a guess that the excitability (tendency to use excided phrases) is turned up. "smoking gun" must be highly rated as a term of excitability. This should apply to other phrases like "outstanding!" or "good find!" "You're right!" etc.

[jcims]

I'm working on a little SRE agent to pre-load tickets with information to help our on-call and I'm already tired of Claude finding 'smoking guns'.

[lloydatkinson]

smoking gun, you're absolutely right, good question, em dash, "it isn't just foo, it's also bar", real honest truth, brutal truth, underscores the issue, delves into, more em dashes, <20 different hr/corporate/cringe phrases>.

It's nauseating.

[hamdingers]

You might find this a fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

[jcynix]

It's what they read on The Internets when training, so don't expect them to generate new phrases, other than what they learned from it?

[cubano]

Come on...haven't we all had to deal with the crazy smart lead who was loaded with those same types of annoying tics?

Considering what these LLMs bring to the table, I think a little tolerance for their cringe phrases is in order.

[jcynix]

You might see certain phrases and mdashes ;-) rather often, because … these programs are trained on data written by people (or Microsoft's spelling correction) which overused them in the last n years? So what should these poor LLMs generate instead?

[nurettin]

At this I'm just so glad that "you're absolutely right!" phase is over.

[HPsquared]

They love clichés, and hate repeating the same words for something (repetition penalty) so they'll say something like "cause" then it's a "smoking gun" then it's something else

[cipehr]

I don't think claude has even once used this in my conversations (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Voice conversations...) Sycophancy, yes absolutely!

Maybe it has something to do with your profile/memories?

[Hikikomori]

It's a smoking gun of Claude usage.

[layer8]

Yes, it’s kind of a corpus delicti. ;)

[simonjgreen]

I see it from GPT5 too a lot

[Fnoord]

> Speaking of smoking guns

Oh shoot! A shooting.

So the TL;DR of this post is: don't change this setting unless you know what you're doing.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Chastise it with a reminder that you're using smokeless powder.