alt Hacker News> 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.Replies
account42 • today at 9:17 AM
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.
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>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.