Non-native speaker here: huh, is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow? I.e., are you a bad english speaker for using it? Fully agree (I guess "fully agree" is the common one?) with this criticism of the article, to me that colloquialism does not sound fishy at all.
There might also be two effects at play:
1. Speech "bubbles" where your preferred language is heavily influenced by where you grew up. What sounds common to you might sound uncommon in Canada.
2. People have been using LLMs for years at this point so what is common for them might be influenced by what they read from LLM output. So while initially it was an LLM colloquialism it could have been popularized by LLM usage.It makes sense in English, however:
a) "you are" vs "you're". "you are" sounds too formal/authoritative in informal speech, and depending on tone, patronising.
b) one could say "you're absolutely right", but the "absolutely" is too dramatic/stressed for simple corrections (an example of sycophancy in LLMs)
If the prompt was something like "You did not include $VAR in func()", then a response like "You're right! Let me fix that.." would be more natural.
Interestingly, "absolutely right" is very common in German: "du hast natürlich absolut Recht" is something which I can easily imagine a friend's voice (or my voice) say at a dinner table. It's "du hast Recht" that sounds a little bit too formal and strong x[.
Agreed on the sycophancy point, in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
Using this kind of strategy eventually leads to the LLM recurrently advertising what it just produced as «straight to the point, no fluff, no bullshit». («Here is the blunt truth»).
Of course no matter how the LLM advertise its production, it is too often non devoid of sycophancy.
> You're absolutely right!
And you're good
I call this the "carpet effect". Where all carpets in Morocco have an imperfection, lest it impersonates god.
The 'Dead Internet' (specifically AI-generated SEO slop) has effectively broken traditional keyword search (BM25/TF-IDF). Bad actors can now generate thousands of product descriptions that mathematically match a user's query perfectly but are semantically garbage/fake.
We had to pivot our entire discovery stack to Semantic Search (Vector Embeddings) sooner than planned. Not just for better recommendations, but as an adversarial filter.
When you match based on intent vectors rather than token overlap, the 'synthetic noise' gets filtered out naturally because the machine understands the context, not just the string match. Semantic search is becoming the only firewall against the dead internet.
Often I do want exact matches, and Google refuses to show them no matter what special characters you use to try to modify the search behaviour.
Personally I'd rather search engines continue to return exact matches and just de-rank content that has poor reputation, and if I want to have a more free-form experience I'll use LLMs instead.
If no human ever used that phrase, I wonder where the ai's learned it from? Have they invented new mannerisms? That seems to imply they're far more capable than I thought they were
Reinforced with RLHF? People like it when they're told they're right.
"We have been waiting 20 minutes!"
"You're absolutely right, and I apologize. We will try to schedule better in the future."
I have never said it to someone with whom I was having a regular discussion.
OTOH, I used to overuse em dashes because the Mac made proper typesetting possible. It used to be the sign that someone had read the very useful The Mac is not a Typewriter by Robin Williams.
I'm sure it's happening, but I don't know how much.
Surely some people are running bots on HN to establish sockpuppets for use later, and to manipulate sentiment now, just like on any other influential social media.
And some people are probably running bots on HN just for amusement, with no application in mind.
And some others, who were advised to have an HN presence, or who want to appear smarter, but are not great at words, are probably copy&pasting LLM output to HN comments, just like they'd cheat on their homework.
I've gotten a few replies that made me wonder whether it was an LLM.
Anyway, coincidentally, I currently have 31,205 HN karma, so I guess 31,337 Hacker News Points would be the perfect number at which to stop talking, before there's too many bots. I'll have to think of how to end on a high note.
(P.S., The more you upvote me, the sooner you get to stop hearing from me.)
32,767 can be the hard max., to permit rare occasional comments after that.
But it was a long death struggle, bleeding out drop by drop. Who remembers that people had to learn netiquette before getting into conversations? That is called civilisation.
The author of this post experienced the last remains oft that culture in the 00s.
I don't blame the horde of uneducated home users who came after the Eternal September. They were not stupid. We could have built a new culture together with them.
I blame the power of the profit. Big companies rolled in like bulldozers. Mindless machines, fueled by billions of dollars, rolling in the direction of the next ad revenue.
Relationships, civilization and culture are fragile. We must take good take of them. We should. but the bulldozers destroyed every structure they lived in in the Internet.
I don't want to whine. There is a learning: money and especially advertising is poison for social and cultural spaces. When we build the next space where culture can grow, let's make sure to keep the poison out by design.
There may be some irony to be found in this human centipede.
Maybe it is a UK thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbelievable_Truth_(radio_...
I love that BBC radio (today: BBC audio) series. It started before the inflation of 'alternative facts' and it is worth (and very funny and entertaining) to follow, how this show developed in the past 19 years.