It's like the /s sign. Can some people not, for themselves, realize that this text is meant as a more or less a joke ? And before you ask, yeah, I am aware some of the people are on the spectrum, but still...
Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?
I know real life people who write essays with claims as outlandish as "software engineering is an ableist field" and are dead serious. But that assertion belongs just as well in a satire piece. It can be very hard to tell if you don't have prior context for the author.
Perhaps they can ask ChatGPT to explain this “sophisticated” satire.
* some sincere people with very extreme takes,
* some trolls that masquerade as the above, to bully others over their credulousness and lack of guile, which is distinct from sarcasm,
* some trolls that insincerely speak anything that earns engagement,
* and more and more bots that mimic the above
So sadly, the answer to your question is generally yes.
Yes. There are literally people who believe any thinking done without AI is Luddite and subpar.
These are not, in my experience, people who have done any great thinking in their lives. They do tend to tweet a lot.
Guess that makes it official then. We are all automatons pretending to be flesh :-)
I also suspect that there are attorneys out there who are starting to use LLMs to generate legal work with a method similar to what the author described (generate prompt, revise minimally). Lawyers are taught to write a certain way which LLMs mirror flawlessly; the surest way to identify LLM generated legal writing is if it happens to hallucinate citations. I used to regularly find hallucinated citations, and occasionally strange reasoning, but both have largely vanished as the LLMS improve.
When it’s satire I think the main blocker of recognition is if you have an emotional reaction first.
As an example, if you are a diehard AI influencer or something you might miss the joke entirely because of the severity of your initial negative reaction.
Just my two cents. Glad I could contribute to completely beating the humor out of this post :)
(I, too, am autistic)
45 Different Types of Humor with Examples in 2026
2) I think that the best satire is fair, and should read to the targets as real commentary. When someone takes your satire seriously, it means that you have successfully commented on reality. Is that inverse Poe's Law?
Otherwise you're just putting words in your enemies' mouths that they would not ever say. I think people do this because they don't have the strength of their own convictions, and wouldn't be able to stand people not getting their joke (and worse, confusing them for extreme believers in something that they disdain.)
To them I would suggest that one doesn't try to make arguments through satire, one rather demonstrate arguments through satire. If you need to make your argument with satire, you actually don't have an argument. Satire without a solid underpinning argument is just propaganda.
At the current time I'm writing this, all other top-level comments are engaging with the article as if it were sincere. So, yes.
In fact, is the neurotypicals who struggle getting it because they rely on nonverbal cues (like a sarcastic tone of voice), which is missing in text, to detect humor.
Deadpan, dry humor is generally more amenable to the autistic mind, because it doesn't have what we consider noise.
If someone needs a laugh track to tell that something is a joke, then either it's a bad joke that wouldn't be made any better with a laugh track, or the problem exists between keyboard and chair.
Problem is that the Internet is too big that there actually could be someone writing this as a serious blog post. For this one it was quite obvious at some point, but when only reading the first few paragraphs I am very certain that there could be someone out there meaning it serious (sadly).
It is just a joke was succesfully used as a goto excuse foe years. Usually when people actually have more of extreme stance, test waters and find that "not yet".
And since it was succesfull, many people dont want to play that game anymore or simply dont believe it anymore.
Yes. Humor is very hard to grasp via text, especially sarcastic humor, because in person we use voice and body language to signal that something is meant as a joke.
The problem we face is that a lot of people are in deep denial about their level of functional literacy.
Sometimes somebody else comments "why is this getting downvoted, it's satire", and that stops or reverses the influx of downvotes.
I was going back and forth on whether it was for far longer than I should have been.
Isn't that a mark of great satire? That the argument sort of works within the zeitgeist, thereby showing the zeitgeist to be corrupted.
Over-the-top satire is funny. But it's clumsy. The fact that some people who are being satirised will agree with the satire is what makes it great.
If you satarise Nazis and some Nazis can't tell that you're making fun of them, that's good satire. If you write a peice that reads like any other peice of Nazi literature, that's not understanding what satire is.
Please consider that the fault here might be in you, not the text.