SILICON VALLEY— A panel of experts, including AI engineers, behavioral scientists, and child healthcare specialists, gathered today to discuss whether the Redditor you’re actively arguing with, u/LastShartbender27, is a rudimentary algorithm designed to keep people engaged with advertisements, or a child aged 12 or under.
As of the publishing of this article, no consensus has been reached.
The experts pored over the Redditor’s comment history – which predominantly consisted of them saying “This” in response to agreeable, inoffensive posts – in an effort to better understand the entity.
Harvard’s Professor of Behavioral Science, Dr. John Mister, leaned on the side of Shartbender being a child, citing a discussion they had about Super Mario 64 on the popular subreddit r/gaming.
“Any measure of AI would have a wealth of online discourse to use when describing Mario 64, and an older teenager interested in video games, even one that had never played the game, would certainly know some details through cultural osmosis,” said Dr. Mister. “To describe the level design as ‘narrow’ and ‘linear’ is ponderous indeed, and indicative of a child making something up.”
Google’s Chief AI Officer, Dr. Rebecca Who, disagreed with Dr. Mister, drawing attention to a comment the Redditor left on an r/television thread about the upcoming adaptation of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, in which Shartbender said, “Ultimately, it’ll all come down to the chemistry between the leads.”
“This is classic bot behavior. To regurgitate a sentiment so frequently and mindlessly repeated by others is a hallmark of an inelegant program,” said Dr. Who.
“We can definitely all agree that a functioning adult would derive no pleasure from getting upvotes from strangers for simply repeating someone else’s thought,” she concluded, garnering nods of agreement from the other experts.
Ultimately, the fact that the Redditor provides no benefit to society was the only thing the experts could uniformly agree on.
At press time reports confirmed you are still fuming about the argument and letting it generally ruin your day.
