Comment by CalRobert
9 hours ago
I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline.
But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.
English isn't ambiguous here either. It's the fault of journalists who have this weird obsession with removing as many words as possible from headlines.
The actual headline is not ambiguous at all
> Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'
Modern journalism deserves a lot of criticism, but this headline is not one of those cases
>I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this.
most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.