What’s he doing? I’m sure it’s benevolent. Just look at those peepers!
I know you’ve all come to think of this site as your spot for the hottest takes, so here’s one: I’m more or less aware of the dangers of unchecked A.I., but honestly, I rarely have a beef with specific robots. The bleep blorps from Star Wars were innocuous, and I’m a big fan of the charming electroacoustically-generated “Harvard Sentences,” (Seriously. Do you know about this project? Serve the hot rum to the tired heroes, indeed!) Heck, I’ve even come to tolerate that googly-eyed doofus “Marty,” who gets in the way at Stop & Shop.
But lately, I’m starting to distrust one algorithmic entity in particular. No, it’s not M3GAN, the sassy, murderous babysitter/gay icon. It’s not even that disembodied head who hates the bus and gets human talk therapy.
The one whose circuit board needs a scramble is that smarmy WordleBot, with its absurd suggestions (“In this case, it’s best to pick the word you think is most likely”), and smug responses (“This choice wasn’t my favorite”). Like life isn’t hard enough? We need judgments directly from our trifling diversions?
Zoog and I typically do the Wordle together, and he, in particular, likes to push the boundaries of words the Bot will accept. The limits on non-English words, we have found, are almost non-existent. Recently it was Zoog’s turn to choose the first word, and he went with paseo, which is more English than Glückspilz, but less English than teapot. The Bot accepted. In fact, we were commended for a “strong opening guess,” and recognized as having more skill than luck. So true! It’s this kind of patronizing pablum that sustains me. No colored letters, but we’ll call it strategy.
As a side note, I’ll say that I’m also generally pleased with the robot’s own choices for guess number two; its go-tos seem to be GUANO and CHRONY and GROIN. Surely someone’s writing Wordle poetry with these beauties.
But of course those are long-recognized, orthographically supportable words, which the Bot’s picks are not always…
This leads us to a few days ago, when I chose the conservative STAIR as a first guess. Botty liked this choice, and commended me for being strategic, and as it happened, pretty lucky.
Then Zoog suggested VIGOR for the second spot, and we started getting some attitude (see below). “No worries,” Bot? Like your opinion matters so much to me? As if my day is somehow always better when you give approving feedback?? YOU DON’T KNOW MY LIFE!!
Truth be told, I had a funny feeling the Bot wasn’t gonna like VIGOR, but love is letting your partner make a bad Wordle guess, and that’s the kind of magnanimous hero I am. Then I played FINER, hoping to fall back into Botty’s good graces, and that’s when things got weird.
"FINER was a good guess, but PWNED would have been more efficient,” said the analysis.
Say what, Bot? PWNED? I mean, there are probably many combinations of letters that “would have been more efficient” (whatever that means), but THEY’RE NOT WORDS. That’s like playing JXQZKK in Scrabble. The point is not just to compile high-flying phonemes. They need to be WORDS. PWNED? Was botty dropped in the bathtub? Is that just a typo?
As it turns out, yes, kind of.
Can’t you see this Zuckerberg Bro in flip flops and a hooded sweatshirt?
You can bet I took this straight to Google, and it looks like the Wordle Bot is a bit of a tech bro. Ugh. And he could have been such a nice boy, patrolling grocery store aisles like his cousin Marty. Apparently, according to the geniuses at haveibeenpwned.com, pwned means something akin to “controlled or compromised”— hacked, basically. It’s part of a group of “modified spellings” called “Leetspeak,” primarily used on the internet. I guess because “p” and “o” are near each other on the keyboard, you might mistype “owned” as “pwned.”
Oh, give me a break. Typos are now allowed in our word games? Being one letter off on the keyboard helps you solve puzzles? This is how A.I. rolls? No offense, but I call BILLSHOT.