I have to agree that your short excerpt doesn’t contain any bad metaphors or similes. (It is cliched to someone very familiar with H.P Lovecraft, and also a little familiar with Harlan Ellison, but not wildly cliched.) Neither do some paragraphs in what I excerpted above. But I didn’t have to cherrypick to get a first-paragraph-with-a-simile-or-metaphor containing, to my taste, three bad ones, or to find more bad ones in an eight paragraph excerpt that was chosen for its cliches. Was I approaching this reading critically? Absolutely! And does Claude land a simile sometimes? Yes, it does. They’re slapdash, not uniformly bad.
Does this not in fact happen to you? Can you show me the next dozen paragraphs, or something comparable? If t doesn’t, do you have any idea what you’re putting in your prompts to make it not happen? It could be some fault in how I’ve been prompting, though I’ve tried a variety of obvious fixes (as I did above), and none has worked.
I have to agree that your short excerpt doesn’t contain any bad metaphors or similes. (It is cliched to someone very familiar with H.P Lovecraft, and also a little familiar with Harlan Ellison, but not wildly cliched.) Neither do some paragraphs in what I excerpted above. But I didn’t have to cherrypick to get a first-paragraph-with-a-simile-or-metaphor containing, to my taste, three bad ones, or to find more bad ones in an eight paragraph excerpt that was chosen for its cliches. Was I approaching this reading critically? Absolutely! And does Claude land a simile sometimes? Yes, it does. They’re slapdash, not uniformly bad.
Does this not in fact happen to you? Can you show me the next dozen paragraphs, or something comparable? If t doesn’t, do you have any idea what you’re putting in your prompts to make it not happen? It could be some fault in how I’ve been prompting, though I’ve tried a variety of obvious fixes (as I did above), and none has worked.