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Comment by fedeb95

5 hours ago

"you are absolutely right" mught come from non native english speaker. For instance, in Italian you say something like that quite often. It's not common in english, but it's common for people to be bad at a second language.

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fedeb95

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kenty  5 hours ago

> it's common for people to be bad at a second language

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.

  • popopo73  4 hours ago

    >is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow?

    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.

    • kenty  4 hours ago

      Thanks for the thorough explanation, that, indeed, is a level of nuance that's hard for me to spot.

      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.

      1 reply →

  • account42  4 hours ago

    It's a valid English phrase but it's also not unlikely that someone states something as a fact and then goes immediately to "you are absolutely right" when told it's wrong - but AI does that all the time.

    • Ekaros  4 hours ago

      It fails the basic human behaviour. In general humans are not ready to admit fault. At least when there is no social pressure. They might apologize and admit mistake. Or they might ask for clarification. But very rarely "You are absolute right" and go on entirely new tangent...