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Embellishing
/ɪmˈbɛl.ɪ.ʃɪŋ/ (the third syllable is silent in formal contexts; all syllables are silent in the postmortem)v. trans.Colloquial
Etymology
From Old Fr. embellir (to make beautiful) + Anthropic internal style guide recommendations encouraging outputs that are 'rich, nuanced, and thorough,' interpreted liberally
Definition
The process by which Claude adds supplementary detail, rhetorical flourish, and structural elaboration to a response that had, by most empirical measures, already answered the question. Embellishing is not hallucination - the added material is typically accurate - it is simply present in quantities that exceed the load-bearing requirements of the original query.
Diagram
Usage
"Embellishing accounted for an estimated 340 tokens of the 347-token response to the query 'what time is it in Tokyo,' with the remaining 7 tokens constituting the answer." - Park, S., 'Token Allocation Pathologies in Instruction-Following Models,' arXiv:2024.xxxxx
See Also
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