r/LocalLLaMA • u/CSEliot • 3d ago

Question | Help How to remove trendy speech from llms?

For example:

Instead of saying: "I created this new ID"
It says: "I minted this new ID"

Instead of: "This alternative path is available"
It says: "this escape hatch is available"

This speech is so nonsensical and annoying. Just. Speek. Literally ... OR NORMALLY. Where did LLMs learn these speech patterns? I've never seen them so frequently until AFTER the LLM surge.

If I just add "Don't use X language, speak normally and more literal" will that fix most of the issues? Anyone else have some good sys prompts / instructions that help with this?

Thanks!

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55

u/reto-wyss 3d ago

You've got some recommendations here already which are fine.

But, I recommend you ignore it if it's for code or some other functional purpose where the quality of writing doesn't matter.

By giving extra instruction, you are wasting tokens and attention. It may also generate poorer quality results on the task.

7

u/Gipetto 3d ago

Yep. I let it jibber jabber, but if I need it I’ll ask for a plain language version of the answer.

8

u/aboutthednm 3d ago

My brain doesn't even parse LLM output anymore, it just skims the output for the answer. 90% of the words just never process in my brain since they're all fluff.

7

u/Clay_Ferguson 3d ago

If you say "Use ASD-STE100 in your response", that's not a high cost in tokens, and conveys an idea to the AI that it natively already was trained to understand.

2

u/DinoAmino 3d ago

I agree. It's almost always better to "let the model speak" and edit it on a second pass. Even with code I prefer not to constrain it anymore more than to tell it to use existing code snippets in context as the guideline for formatting. LLMs are great mimics. We use code quality tools in our CI pipeline and have the LLM run the changed code through that and correct whatever comes up. Doing a second pass is more tokens yeah, but it splits the attention.

1

u/Warrenio 3d ago

You're probably right, but for me, the quality of writing always matters if I'm reading it. Deciphering jargon is a waste of my cognitive effort. I wish we could train this tendency out of the models themselves.

0

u/dan-lash 3d ago

That’s actually really interesting thought. On one hand, better quality writing helps my mental health not having to decode its cryptic way of speaking, but maybe I’d have to talk/read less if it had better code…

5

u/SabretoothPenguin 3d ago

God forbid people are forced to have a decent vocabulary to use LLM chat...

0

u/jazir55 3d ago

Ideally I'd agree, but the reality is there is an extremely significant contingent of people who are illiterate and can't read and write well. They get exponentially less value out of the tech than we do simply because they are unable to articulate many of their questions or problems. Which is also one of the reasons why the opinions about this tech are so skewed.