## Metadata - Author: [[Benn Stancil]] - Full Title:: The Model Is Man-Made - Category:: #🗞️Articles - URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/the-model-is-man-made - Read date:: [[2026-08-22]] ## Highlights > The model is not a natural equation, slowly being scraped out of the dirt by Anthropic’s archeologists. It is being invented, version by version, across a million choices: What training data did they use? How heavily should they [weight text from books](https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf) compared to text from Wikipedia? What methods did they use to train the model? How did they score its outputs? What tasks do they want the model to do well on? Are they designed to [maximize clarity and precision](https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writing#:~:text=So%20even%20in%20a%20private%20conversation%20between%20a%20user%20and%20Claude%2C%20which%20will%20never%20be%20read%20by%20anyone%20other%20than%20the%20user%2C%20Claude%20will%20begin%20making%20word%20choices%20in%20the%20name%20of%20marking%20its%20output%20in%20statistically%20predictable%20ways%20rather%20than%20maximizing%20clarity%20and%20precision.) or to [write functional code](https://benn.substack.com/p/the-frontier-fails-the-turing-test#:~:text=Or%2C%20perhaps%E2%80%94,what%20it%20did.)? Or to make Anthropic money? What [system prompts](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts)[7](https://benn.substack.com/p/the-model-is-man-made/#footnote-7) did they use? How many decisions were made with lazy defaults and round numbers, by engineers on a deadline? > These decisions are as much manipulations as watermarking. But we forget that—and ascribe them some divine quality, as if they are the model and other things are not—because they happen at distance, [in ways that are harder to see](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_a_distance#%22Spooky_action_at_a_distance%22). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m0m0xezdn3zy7608h99z0axj))