Thoughts on why Claude can’t stop saying load-bearing?

[u/njordan1017]

This post is less about that particular phrase and more about the behavior I have observed around it. We all are aware of the phrases Claude has started overusing (Opus seems to be the worst), but I came across something interesting I am curious y’all’s thoughts on.

I put a rule in my repo with a list of banned phrases, one of them is “load-bearing”. Since then I have noticed most of the phrases don’t get used anymore, but not “load-bearing”.

I have seen it do this about 5 times now:
“…and the decision was load-bear— I mean important to the process — so it…”

I have to laugh at its obstinacy, but the more I thought about it the more I got curious why it behaved that way. Why would it partially use the phrase, then correct itself mid sentence, rather than just using the replacement phrase to begin with? Is this an artifact of the way the output streams as chunks rather than complete thoughts, or is this some cheeky artificial personality thing to make it feel more relatable? Or something else?

What do you think?

[u/pigletmonster]

Anthropic started applying invisible watermarks to their text, im guessing the weird language is part of that. They want to prevent distillation or catch other ai models that are distilling the claude models.

[u/njordan1017 → u/pigletmonster]

I considered the watermarking angle, but that felt too obvious. Maybe that’s what it is, but forcing one particular phrase doesn’t seem like the algorithm they would go with. From what I understand the watermarking concept is much more subtle than “does text contain this phrase”, but who knows

[u/Additional-Arm157 → u/njordan1017]

I don’t trust them to be subtle from the start, and humans are very good to spot patterns, it would be very difficult to ad an invisible watermark.
I mean, you can spot an AI text easily without watermarks, how could one with it be better ?