I had Claude make a world cloud from its responses because I was curious to see how big "honest" would be. It barely showed up, so I asked it to just give me the counts and it responded telling me it was trained not to use the word "honest" much because it makes people distrust responses (in addition to showing me the counts).

I just did this on one .claude directory and >20% of the answers there included some variation of "real", "actual", "exact", "honest", "genuine", "valid", "true". ~15% in that directory contain some variation of "real", "genuine" or "honest". This is excluding thinking tokens, sub-agent output, etc.

"You're right for pointing this out. Honestly, your comment raises a real concern — they genuinely RL'd that over the top." - Claude

This is one of those things I barely noticed because I tend to read fast and skim. Someone pointed the over use of these terms and now its like hitting a set of spike strips every time I'm reading the output from any given model.

Its like when someone points something out a in picture you never saw and now you cannot "unsee" it ever again.

"genuinely load-bearing" is the one that triggers me the most now.