Comment by TomGarden
6 hours ago
Agreed. The more knowledge you amass on a subject, the more important it becomes to be extremely specific and nuanced - or your communications end up being incorrect. You become better at expressing your thoughts, but harder to understand.
The weird thing is, that's not what AI models seem to be doing. The prose is just weird.
> You become better at expressing your thoughts, but harder to understand.
This happens most though when the speaker doesn't (or care to) understand their audience.
Eg i find effective communication requires expertise in both the subject matter domain but also the reference of the listener. Eg in ELI5 framing, if you don't know what information 5yr olds are expected to know you'll do a poor job at an ELI5.
It often feels like Claude does poorly at both framing the response relative to what it "thinks" the listener knows, but also the prose is... sideways, just weird as you said.
I find people tend to lack nuance in their communication more often - leading to problems and misunderstandings.
If I don't grok an elaborate explanation, I can ask for clarification. If it's explained to me in an overly simplistic or unnuanced way, I'll walk away with a false sense of understanding.
That said, I'm sure we all have very different concentrations of these types of people and problems around us. I've definitely met some engineers who seem to actively try to make their language incomprehensible
I'm going to assume it's very difficult to assume what a user actually knows from the very small signal that comes in a prompt.
effective communication is knowing who the audience is. Everyone naturally knows their audience to some extent, except for the "neuro-atypicals".
It is unsurprising that a LLM fails, without coaching, to effectively communicate.
> The prose is just weird.
Agreed. Do you think it's due to that EU issue of making AI text be identifiable?
That went into effect a month ago. Claude prose quality has been a disaster at least since Opus 4.7
They’re training the models on generated slop. I’ve done a comparison on samples from the different versions of Claude and they’re worlds apart. The ancient, supposedly obsolete models speak normal English.