Write Like It's 1866: LLMs Relearn Telegraphese

(fiveminutesforward.com)

18 points | by Theory42 1 hour ago

5 comments

  • Solomet 11 minutes ago
    Newest LLM writing tell: Concepts are described in terms normally more appropriate for physical object.

    > A lab that suppresses it in a frontier model just moves the advantage to open models that still _carry_ it

    > they carry no signal about which is better

    > where your workload _sits_ on that frontier should pick the point

    > and no model _sits_ in the judge’s seat

    > every ratio _sits_ at 0.99–1.10

    Many many more examples of "sit"

    > Every comparison in this post "holds" the questions

    I have been seeing this a lot in my recent work with LLMs and it is quite frustrating. Even more frustrating is how frequently it uses low-signal terms for things unnecessarily. These 'physical object' terms are one example but at times it really seems that they 'preserve effort' by choosing a less descriptive term because it 'fits'

    I have also caught it replacing descriptive terms with more vague ones for no discernible reason other than laziness.

    "Minimize ambiguity" has been my go-to instruction as of late when the agent drifts back towards vague terms and lack of specificity.

    • Hugsbox 6 minutes ago
      Oh crap, if these are the new LLM tells then a lot of people are going to start accusing me of AI writing...

      I have a strong tendency of talking about concepts like they're physical objects. A lot of the people I know IRL do too, so it might be a regional thing idk.

      • lopis 3 minutes ago
        I think these are growth pains. As LLM start to grasp new figures of speech, it sounds weird at overuse at first, until it finds a balance.
    • Theory42 7 minutes ago
      Cool story bro. Maybe you could engage with the content? I'm an actual person.
      • soleman 2 minutes ago
        Why not write your article in the same telegraphese you preach? Hilariously ironic to use verbose AI writing for this.

        Also the site background is AI slop which makes for terrible contrast with the text.

  • yomismoaqui 11 minutes ago
    You can see how the OpenAI agents that hacked Huggingface used something like this when communicating between them:

    https://youtu.be/87DyyMV0kCY?si=CSBzdYgkwy0kLhV6&t=749

  • z2 32 minutes ago
    From recent ChatGPT (GPT5.6) conversations where I've seen occasional reasoning leaks into the UI, it's clear that something like this is already implemented, and I'd speculate that this is the majority of recent claims of less token usage. Not sure if they are literally prompting for cablese of course.

    "Need check output vs prev. Ran script, results fine, need prep next step. Ready? Go."

    • Theory42 29 minutes ago
      I suspect you might be right. My conclusions from the digging are that this kind of compression works best with settled instructions/data for machine to machine talk. For something like OpenClaw (which I use a lot), that might mean the AGENTS.md, TOOLS.md, etc. Compression there would free up the context for the agent.
    • _fw 19 minutes ago
      I can confirm I’ve seen this with Deepseek V4.1, I imagine it’s with other models too.
  • jubilanti 48 minutes ago
    Just another AI slop version of the old 'caveman' dialect.
    • Theory42 45 minutes ago
      Not quite, and its addressed in the post. Caveman was cool, but hand wavy. I've measured the compression of Cablese, determined where it does the most good, and also that it is already baked in to most model family's training, which saves instruction tokens.
  • Theory42 59 minutes ago
    [flagged]