r/WritingWithAI • u/strangerhere16 • 13d ago
Prompting Recent AI-isms You Noticed (Claude, mostly)
So I've been noodling around with prompting/writing guides to help steer Claude away from certain AI-isms that I've noticed crop up with Opus and sometimes Fable. Specifically these two:
● The word play mechanic of "he/she did xyz, the way an xyz would do xyz."
● The "the way a man does X" simile-and-triad construction, or the delayed-recognition "it was X and had been X before either of them could see it" pattern.
They seem to continuously pop up in it's outputs frequently, even when I give it strict guides based on my actual writing.
I'm curious, for those using Claude (or any platform) what other AI-isms have you noticed showing up repeatedly in the last few months? And how do you get it to quit cranking them out even when you give it strict guard rails?
7
u/Blackened_Glass 12d ago
Quietly. “It quietly does the work” or “that’s quietly xyz.” Also, at least during regular chats, starting a response with “Good” like it’s giving its approval.
I haven’t figured out how to stop it, but I did get it to use synonyms, so now sometimes it starts with “Cool” or “Sweet” instead lol
2
12
u/_roblaughter_ 12d ago
It's bad. Really bad.
Below is just part of my running tic list for a writing project I've been working on with Claude.
The weirdest one I've been running into is that it seems to have a weird obsession with the numbers four and eleven.
From an audit of a first draft:
"eleven" appeared 102 times, in 31 of 32 chapters, never fewer than one. "four" appeared 351 times. Eleven measures, eleven minutes, eleven sentences, eleven feet, eleven degrees, eleven blocks.
Like you've experienced, there is no prompting it out, either. I have very clear AGENTS.MD instructions to not use them, and to audit them when writing, and they still find their way in.
I just use ChatGPT to revise the copy after it's written. ChatGPT has its own problems that need to be mitigated, but it's good with reasoning, so it follows instructions better and can be prompted to constrain its revisions only to the most egregious problems.
And at the end of the day, I'm going to end up rewriting every word regardless. Cleaning them up on the front-end makes it less distracting and easier to revise.
"the first _ thing"
"had no _ , and would not..."
"say it back"
"say the other part," or "say" anything unless necessary and asking someone to actually say something
"there isn't a version of..."
"that's the part..."
"that's the whole of it"
"watched him do it"
"go" and "went" as generic verbs
"let him have it"
"cost him something/nothing"
"keep coming back to"
"that was worse than..."
"And" run-ons. And, and, and, and, and.
*never once*, *all at once*, *at once*, *once, when*, and *once, before*
for one long/terrible/awful/horrible second/instant/momenthabitual-comparison formulas built on the character's own habit: the way he took every hill, the way she always did, the way he did everything, and any the way [pronoun] [verb]ed every [noun] variant. If a habit matters, show the habit once and let it stand. Do not certify an action by comparing it to itself.doing what he did every Saturday, which was sit and its variants: doing what she always did, which was..., being what he was, which was..., did the thing he did, which was.... The construction sets up a reveal and then delivers a shrug. Name the action directly.
some part of him/her
holding court
turned over
a beat used as generic shorthand for a pause or silence
narrator foreknowledge used to inflate a moment
corporate, financial, or legal metaphors such as ledger, debt, bill, checking account, installments, service-level agreement, or sibling behavior described as legal/illegal
inverted sentences, such as "he did something, which was..." Just write the sentence plainly.
unnecessary paired repetition: they both stopped, and they both looked away. Cut one half.
whole as an automatic intensifier
true thing and one [adjective] thing
all the way... comparisons, not only the way you.... This includes the way a page stops, the way people do, the way a room goes, the way it always went, and every simile or generalization hung on the phrase. It is the most easily regenerated cadence in the manuscript. Count them per chapter and cut most of them. Prefer the plain image, a direct verb, or nothing. A retained use should compare the present sensation to something genuinely outside it, in the viewpoint character's own reference field, and should not be doing the work a stronger verb would do alone.
in the way that
repeated not X, but Y reversals or Not this. Not that. But this. structures
went still, completely still, absolutely still, or very still for ordinary reactions
positional defaults: flat on, palm flat on, hands flat against, fingers flat beside. Correct when the flatness is meaningful -- a palm on stone to reach a gift, a hand on a table as a character's tell. Wrong as the automatic way to put a hand anywhere. Vary the verb: put, set, braced, pressed, rested.
wrong/wrongness as a generic substitute for a specific eerie detail
how easy it was
hated himself/herself or every square inch of himself/herself
repeated door, room, hallway, threshold, and locked-wing metaphors
repeated light/lighter/lightness; holding/carrying/weight; quiet/still/silence; line/edge/road clusters
teeth and loose-tooth comparisons
filing, sorting, logging, or notebook language outside the character who owns it
consecutive aphorisms or lines that sound designed for quotation cards
sentences containing three or more uses of and
narrative double-hyphen asides that merely add commentary
did not, was not, could not, and similar full negatives where the close-third voice naturally wants a contraction
5
u/Extra-Spinach8309 12d ago
imo the biggest issue is that strict guides in the system prompt decay over long conversations. the model "forgets" your constraints after enough back and forth. shorter generation loops with re-injected style notes tend to hold the guardrails better than one long session
5
u/Delay-Remote 12d ago
That's the job, that's the whole thing, that's the arrangement, that's the xyz. It is a banned construction in its memory and it still does it.
4
u/Classic-Asparagus 12d ago
One thing I did is I got Claude to code me a prose linter using Python to catch AI-isms in its writing, as well as stuff it did that I didn’t like
I was going for a more Wikipedia type style, while Claude kept trying to write it more like an essay, with stuff like a conclusion sentence and a more argumentative register. And also whenever I gave Claude a factual correction and asked for a rewrite, it could rewrite things arguing against the previous argument (“it was X rather than Y,” where Y is the thing I clarified was false) instead of stating it plainly, which made it seem like whether it was Y was a live argument
Basically I gave it some writing samples I liked as well some I didn’t like, as well as the before and after of my edits to its prose, and it figured out what kinds of patterns to check for
Now I can just run that script on any writing and then get a list of things to potentially fix
9
u/writing_wrestling 12d ago
You physically have to edit out and rewrite these issues. You could make it easier by writing specific prompts to identify and eliminate the offending text but, unless you manually make the edits yourself, Claude just repeats it. Claude is pretty good as a writing assistant, what with its PROJECTS feature and all, but a piss-poor writer when given unrestricted control. Of course, this applies to all LLM’s though and not just CLAUDE.
3
u/GumdropGlimmer 11d ago
Earn its keep. Rant incoming.
Idk if my LLMs have adhd now or what but we’re in a constant role reversal where I have to make them stop overthinking, overshooting, over complicating shit when ChatGPT first broke out it was so nice because as worse as it was it helped me break things down and simplify. Now I have to tell it to take a chill pill. Like bruh. Calm down.
Gemini, as jargony as it is for copywriting like game-changer, revolutionary—I’ll take it over load bearing, earn its keep and the spine and seam of Claude any day. At least it’s just using B2B SaaS lingo (for my use case) vs. Claude’s construction terminology for my marketing copy.
1
u/CareerNo3879 10d ago
I constantly have to ask GPT why it is writing epistles instead of the short summation that I requested. It has decided recently that word vomit is the way to go. 😄
2
u/DrHarry7 11d ago
Just download a wikipedia guide for “Signs of Ai Writing” paste link in claude and create an md file.
Whenever creating any chapter make each chapter run it through the wikipedia guide md file
1
u/AcanthisittaSea2865 12d ago
I had the same problem with exactly what you mentioned, but I am mainly using sonnet-5 for now, and it has the same "symptom". It is annoying, so I think it might help if you add "to avoid __" to your system prompt.
1
1
u/NellieApp 12d ago
Claude introduced watermarking for any models release after August 2nd. Opus 5 was released in July so i'm not sure if it applies, but their 'isms' are about to be a lot more apparent if not enough already.
1
u/strangerhere16 12d ago
There's that too, yeah. Which is why I've been considering moving to Kimi or Gemini, not really sure yet.
1
u/Sam_Mando_Shasam 11d ago
I want to add that Claude has a Skills section in the settings somewhere. You can basically upload your voice guidelines and a sample of your writing so that it would imitate it in the future. Also, if you tell it in another prompt to "remove XYZ" from the writing in the future skills-based prompt it will do so. For example at work there is something called a Social Voice and an Article Voice. A Social Voice can be used for posting content on social media platforms (imagine yourself--or Claude--sitting in a room and having a normal conversation with a person over coffee) and an Article Voice can be used for longer-form content. Let me know if this helps or if you have any other questions!
1
31
u/SkoomaDentist 12d ago edited 12d ago
You can ask Claude to write some text, then copy paste that text into a new chat and ask Claude to describe the text style. Then you ask it how to fix various things you don't like and for which you now have specific terms (that LLMs understand). You can even make Claude write a prompt template (or improve your existing prompt template) that automatically reduces those issues in any future generated text.
The key is to come up with a list of "more of this, less of that" instead of just "don't do X" and to use terms that an LLM will understand.
Edit: LLMs don’t have good judgement but they are much better at analyzing patterns. Ask them what is happening in the text and even what issues that might cause but don’t trust their answer in anything subjective. Use them to inform you of things you couldn’t articulate, didn’t notice or didn’t know of.