The impossible ticket: defining and rewarding away 'Claudeishness' in model style

menhguin · x · 2026-09-14

A discussion on why making Claude sound less Claudeish is a near-impossible task: the style is baked into pretraining samples, leaks into other models, and is subtly hard to define as a reward. Using rubric-as-reward risks penalizing genuinely helpful, supportive speech patterns. 'At some point I just started doing linguistics,' one engineer says — an Askell-tier linear ticket.

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