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What does the pace car in a race do? Aka safety car? Or the pacesetter for a marathon. It's a perfectly cromulent use of the word. It's like when LLMs using six dollar words like delve. Some people have better diction than others, and it turns out that AI has read the whole dictionary. Anti-intellectualism is alive and well so we have to dumb things down to sound human rather than come across as smart/AI.

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I would expect something truly intelligent to be able to communicate well, if nothing else. That means knowing your audience, using plain language where it makes sense. Also, it yaps on and on, babbles endlessly when it a human would likely express something in a much shorter concise way. This is especially obvious when you generate project READMEs or technical docs. I find them borderline unreadable.

It’s quite the opposite. The AI language in this case is tiring and dumb. Just because there is the concept of a pace car doesn’t mean it makes sense to pace random locations or objects. Pacing the front door, pacing the cat, pacing the sofa, pacing the moon. We only know what it means because we already read it before. It is the lazy semi-human language by Claude which takes more effort to parse than to produce, and which makes us miss and appreciate writers.

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