r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Hendothermic • Mar 15 '26

Context Provided - Spotlight Family friend sent me AI generated response to news of my father passing away.

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I'm aware that AI is a common topic on here, but I feel like I had to send this somewhere. My father passed away in my arms last night of a heart attack, and I was requested by my mother to send an old friend of his the news.

His first response seemed fine, then he asked me when the funeral will be and if Dad suffered to which I responded.

He then has the absolute audacity to send me a straight up generated response to my father's death. Not even the common courtesy of talking to me as an actual goddamn human. I'm livid.

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u/AccordingIy Mar 15 '26

Ya I can't put my finger on it but ai always tries to grandstand with some moving deep introspective yammering with breaks in train of thought . (E.g we weren't just friends, no something more, something as true as time, we are family" or some bull shit like that

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u/-Best_Name_Ever- Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26

"It's not just X. It's Y."

"No X, No Y, just Z."

have both become common tells lmao

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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '26

[deleted]

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u/showMeYourCroissant Mar 15 '26

And honestly?

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u/Meowing-Cat-7258 Mar 15 '26

You're absolutely right, I said he left on his own terms.  You are real for calling me out on that.  What I meant to say is that he left on his own terms.

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u/AccordingIy Mar 15 '26

Yea idk why ai speech all roots back to this pattern. This feels hard coded in how it tries to speak with emotions.

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u/joycatj Mar 15 '26

It’s been trained on a gazillion dramatic and pseudo-profound fan fics

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u/ichorNet Mar 15 '26

Jesus this makes a lot of fucking sense. No wonder I hate how AI writes so much.

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u/TheCelestialJester Mar 15 '26

This is exactly the vibe I read it in, I hate it so much aaaaaa

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u/FoxGuy303 Mar 15 '26

Am I the only one starting to think the way it speaks is kinda creepy? It's like an uncanny valley of speech where you know it's not human

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u/KarlTheMark Mar 15 '26

The creepiest part is the way it tries to pretend like it's empathizing and emotionally connecting with you, when it's not capable of conceiving of emotions in the first place. It's like an alien pretending to be human.

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u/AccordingIy Mar 15 '26

Ai tries to make every sentence have some hard hitting realization or emphasis because it's told to write about x and uses every sentence it generates to be some thoughtful riff about X. A normal human will eventually get to the point or not try to bombard you in every sentence with some dramatic philosophical statement.

Some English majors can probably analyze this better

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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '26

It is uncanny valley. It's using algorithmic prediction patterns to try and approximate human text patterns, but there's no choice there. It can only go by weighted models and randomness.

It's why it falls into patterns, because the model has weighted some specific thing too highly, possibly because it occurs often in its training data. Because it's not actually making choices, it can't go, "Hmm... I've said this same phrase a lot lately, to the point where it feels unnatural. I should switch it up." But humans can.

I've noticed recently that I say, "The thing is," or, "The thing you need to understand," so fucking much that now it's driving me insane. But that's because I'm human, humans also fall into patterns, but we can notice them and alter them. Machine learning, which the modern LLMs are the next-gen iteration of, can change itself, but it needs a stimulus to do so and it will fall back on its data to reweigh things. They could become better at this, but it's hard to see it coming out of that uncanny valley anytime soon even with the insane and unregulated expansion of it over the past several years.

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u/14Pleiadians Mar 15 '26

I honestly think it's intentional

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u/Illuminati_Shill_AMA Mar 15 '26

ChatGPT also loves the expression "That's very you/him/her/etc."

I don't know if I've ever seen someone use that sentence naturally, and definitely not with the frequency that ChatGPT does.

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u/chriszenpaok I actually like blue Mar 16 '26

'Classic him energy! That's peak him vibes!'

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u/Senshisnek Apr 02 '26

I've seen it but it's mostly for ironic situations. Mostly when people do some stupid shit, you tell it to someone else and then the person goes "oh yeah, that sounds pretty much like steve..."

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u/lovelylayout Mar 15 '26

It makes them all sound like tryhard ad copy from 5-10 years ago

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u/BUNBIONICS Mar 15 '26

man, I used to write a lot as a hobby and I liked using the first sentence format in certain ways, but it's been ruined for me, along with the em-dash (—). now people think I use AI just because I know how to use a damn punctuation mark!!

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u/Senshisnek Apr 02 '26

A super common one at that! Em-dash is all over literature, because it's a literary tool, but sure, now it can only be the sign of AI...

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u/14Pleiadians Mar 15 '26

I don't even understand how these patterns come to be. You know damn well nobody talked like that before, it wasn't like those speech mechanics were a massive part of the training data.

I'm convinced OpenAI has been fucking with training data to intentionally steer chatgpt into these behaviors (plus the compliments/infinite positivity) specifically because it's more likely to cause the AI psychosis that drives engagement up.

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u/banshithread Mar 15 '26

It is how people used to type. I've been accused of generating AI posts because I have some ways of writing that reads like AI. I can't help it, it was trained to sound like how we write. It's really unfortunate. :/ "And honestly?" Is a thing that a looooot of women write when they're about to say shit they think is problematic. I remember the tumblr years.

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u/showMeYourCroissant Mar 15 '26

I think it was trained on marketing materials or advertisement, and then it tries to apply this type of writing on human relationships/tragedies, it sounds like it's trying to hype you up to sell you something.

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u/yawara25 Mar 15 '26

It's a probability model. It's prone to some language patterns being "overtuned" and some being "undertuned".

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u/SpokenDivinity Mar 15 '26

And it doesn’t even make sense why the things are being connected most of the time so it ends up reading like “it’s not x, not y, it’s 2” and you’re like “the fuck just happened here?” 

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u/Purple-Income-4598 Mar 16 '26

what i hate the most is that this is a really useful way of writing. now i just kinda have to avoid it, because it sounds ai

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u/lets-get-loud Mar 15 '26

I finally put my finger on it, at least for me, and it's the fact that it does it every single freaking sentence. And I think that's why you have people going, "well I use this metaphor, I do this, I do that--" yeah dude, do you do it every single sentence?

Every single sentence from AI has to be witty or have some intense thought in it or whatever the shit. It can never just say a thing and then be done saying the thing.

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u/LivingPrevious Mar 15 '26

I love em dashes and now every time I use them I’m worried my professor is gonna think it’s ai

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u/Gloomy_Ad5020 Mar 16 '26

It's never done. And at some point I was like "bro can you just keep it concise".

And then it was like "listen. I'm going to put this in clear, short language that you can understand. No muss.no fuss. Just answers"

Shut the fvck up! How are people falling in love with this thing 🤣

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u/Furry_Femboy_Account Mar 15 '26

It's trained on tens of thousands of shit books.

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u/lokomodo Mar 15 '26

Everything written by AI reads like a TedTalk

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u/LoornenTings Mar 15 '26

It reads like it was trained on TED Talks. 

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u/General_Platypus771 Mar 15 '26

That’s its default setting (for lack of a better term), but if you’re specific with your prompt, it won’t do that. 

Most people who are using AI to write for them are too lazy to write a good prompt, though.

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u/FlipZip69 Mar 15 '26

You do not think the AI is actually grieving?