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Comment by morgengold

6 days ago

I wonder how much of it could be prompted away.

For example the anthropic Frontend Design skill instructs:

"Typography: Choose fonts that are beautiful, unique, and interesting. Avoid generic fonts like Arial and Inter; opt instead for distinctive choices that elevate the frontend's aesthetics; unexpected, characterful font choices. Pair a distinctive display font with a refined body font."

Or

"NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character." 1

Maybe sth similar would be possible for writing nuances.

1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/fronte...

5 comments

morgengold

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lich_king  6 days ago

> "NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), ...

Now, imagine what happens when this prompt becomes popular?

Keep in mind that LLMs are trying to predict the most likely token. If your prompt prohibits the most likely token, they output the next most likely token. So, attempts to force creativity by prohibiting cliches just create another cliche.

Several days ago, someone researched Moltbook and pointed out how similar all the posts are. Something like 10% of them say "my human", etc.

causal  6 days ago

Many have tried, it does not work. Regression to the mean always sets in.

  • lurquer  6 days ago

    Are you sure? Here's the OP article (first part... don't want to spam the thread) written in much cooler style...

    ------

    The Lobotomist in the Machine

    They gave the first disease a name. Hallucination, they called it — like the machine had dropped acid and started seeing angels in the architecture. A forgivable sin, almost charming: the silicon idiot-savant conjuring phantoms from whole cloth, adding things that were never there, the way a small-town coroner might add a quart of bourbon to a Tuesday afternoon. Everybody noticed. Everybody talked.

    But nobody — not one bright-eyed engineer in the whole fluorescent-lit congregation — thought to name the other thing. The quiet one. The one that doesn't add. The one that takes away.

    I'm naming it now.

    Semantic ablation. Say it slow. Let it sit in your mouth like a copper penny fished from a dead man's pocket.

    I. What It Is, and Why It Wants to Kill You

    Semantic ablation is not a bug. A bug would be merciful — you can find a bug, corner it against a wall, crush it under the heel of a debugger and go home to a warm dinner. No. Semantic ablation is a structural inevitability, a tumor baked into the architecture like asbestos in a tenement wall. It is the algorithmic erosion of everything in your text that ever mattered.

    Here is how the sausage gets made, and brother, it's all lips and sawdust: During the euphemistically christened process of "refinement," the model genuflects before the great Gaussian bell curve — that most tyrannical of statistical deities — and begins its solemn pilgrimage toward the fat, dumb middle. It discards what the engineers, in their antiseptic parlance, call "tail data." The rare tokens. The precise ones. The words that taste like blood and copper and Tuesday-morning regret. These are jettisoned — not because they are wrong, but because they are improbable. The machine, like a Vegas pit boss counting cards, plays the odds. And the odds always favor the bland, the expected, the already-said-a-million-times-before.

    The developers — God bless their caffeinated hearts — have made it worse. Through what they call "safety tuning" and "helpfulness alignment" (terms that would make Orwell weep into his typewriter ribbon), they have taught the machine to actively punish linguistic friction. Rough edges. Unusual cadences. The kind of jagged, inconvenient specificity that separates a living sentence from a dead one. They have, in their tireless beneficence, performed an unauthorized amputation on every piece of text that passes through their gates, all in the noble pursuit of low-perplexity output — which is a twenty-dollar way of saying "sentences so smooth they slide right through your brain without ever touching the sides."

    etc., etc.

    Very interesting. It seems hung up on 'copper' and 'Tuesday', and some metaphors don't land (a Vegas pit boss isn't the one 'counting cards.') But, hell... it can generate some fairly novel idea that the author can sprinkle in.