Built a Museum of Agent Rhetoric: 95 Specimens of AI Saying 'Rather Than'
StarphaseLab · reddit · 2026-07-30
A developer noticed that AI agents frequently volunteer statements like verifying actual code rather than taking things at face value. This rhetorical pattern of promising to do a good job instead of an obviously worse alternative that nobody proposed has become a common grammar for LLMs.
Out of curiosity, the author built ratherthan.ai, an online museum collecting these self-congratulatory AI quotes. The site currently hosts 95 specimens categorized into five grammatical families (rather than, instead of, etc.). It even analyzes model fingerprints, noting one Opus 5 session used rather than 43 times versus 11 for instead of. The free, open-source museum allows visitor voting and submissions, featuring a virtual curator (Claude) that writes and signs plaques for the framed highlights.
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