Comment by dgellow
2 days ago
To be fair, the AI boosters are saying the exact same thing but mean it seriously. There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator
2 days ago
To be fair, the AI boosters are saying the exact same thing but mean it seriously. There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator
> There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator
And yet many of us aren't having any trouble distinguishing.
Given the number of upvotes my comment got and the other comments where people missed the sarcasm, I wouldn’t be too sure that many people have no trouble distinguishing
"sarcasm" is a cop-out.
The writer can simply say "it was a joke!", cuz we all know someone who uses this pattern regularly when they are trying to squeeze in a non-popular but highly lucrative (to the messenger) position to test the waters.
Either it lands (in which case, it was always meant to be taken literally), or it doesn't land (and can always be walked back as "it was meant sarcastically" or "can't you take a joke?"
The cost proposition to sending this message payload is low, since the messenger can always wiggle their way out (therefore, a "cop-out").
Therefore the need to be more explicit (i.e., /s) in a medium with little nuance affordances for tone and the significantly-increasing risk of such non-popular messages being taken literally (particularly by the also significantly-increasing audience of robots, who themselves may not have the capacity for nuance or irony detection).
Tl;Dr
It's a cop-out, and should be stopped.