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Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

Emojis at the end of a statement online are a generational thing, not an AI thing.

Replying to an email inline rather than at the top marks you out as of a certain generation. Using text emojis rather than finding the graphical emoji does too.

Everyone needs to relax about AI generation anyway (did you learn something useful or not? If you did, does it matter if it was AI generated as a site?), but saying "this is what people under 30 frequently do, so it must be fake", is just this weird vibe spreading everywhere I don't get at all.

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It isn't a generational thing. The choice of emoji is a generational thing, but people of all ages do it. AI most certainly does not use emoji in the same way a young person does (unless you encourage it to, but even then it comes across as cringeworthy). If anything it's closer to how a middle-aged person uses them.

I'd also say the use of text emoticons has all but died out in anything other than ironic usage, or in situations where it's difficult to use unicode emoji (e.g. games or this very site)

When text is very obviously generated by AI it communicates to the reader that there is nothing of value to be read. It always writes in the same vapid, overly enthusiastic, overly verbose way. It's grating and generally conveys very little information per word. It's a cliché at this point, but if nobody bothered to write it then why would I bother to read it?

I'm talking about this kinda style...

* <Arrow hitting target emoji> 15 compiled libraries!

* <green tick> Works on my machine

* <red cross> No ARM support.

None of which are at the end of a statement. So, I'm not sure who you're replying to.

Incidentally, I recently reviewed a PR heavily written by Cursor that had statements like this.

    logger.info("<magnifying glass emoji> DEBUG: {actual message")

And then CursorBot reviewed it and flagged the emojis as indicative of "debugging statements not suitable for production".

Which made me laugh, loudly, and only somewhat sadly, Cursor added the emojis, Cursor then flagged them as not appropriate in prod code.

But CursorBot missed the obvious problem with

    logger.info("DEBUG: ...")

emoji at the end of a statement are not the same thing as emoji adorning or replacing every heading

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