Language Log

Geoff Brumfiel, "Kiss reality goodbye: AI-generated social media has arrived", All Things Considered 10/3/2025:

A fascist SpongeBob SquarePants, a dog driving a car and Jesus playing Minecraft – these are just a few of the things you can see as you flip through OpenAI's new app populated exclusively with short-form videos generated using artificial intelligence.

And if you can't find what you're looking for, don't worry: you can make it with ease using a small text-based prompt window in the app. The result is a highly addictive stream of sometimes funny and sometimes strange 10-second videos.

"New Autism Data Challenge Long-Held Assumptions", MedPage Today 10/3/2025:

Autism diagnosed during early childhood had a distinct genetic and developmental profile compared with autism diagnosed later, a large analysis of multiple cohorts showed.

[…]

The results challenge a long-held assumption that autism has a unified underlying cause.

The Strange Reason Chinese Doesn’t Borrow Words

Time for another Julesy:

Lois Beckett, "Perky Maxwell House viral ad takes on housing crisis as ‘Maxwell Apartment’", The Guardian 10/1/2025:

Housing in the US has become so unaffordable that a coffee company has based a viral marketing campaign on the idea that almost nobody can afford to buy a house.

Maxwell House coffee, a 133-year-old brand, recently launched a marketing campaign rebranding themselves as “Maxwell Apartment coffee”.

“Maxwell House? In this economy?” a narrator asks in a video ad, promising that Maxwell Apartment is “the same affordable coffee you love, now with an even more affordable name”.

A pathbreaking, new book from Brill:

The Vernacular World of Pu Songling
Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Late Imperial China
Series:  Sinica Leidensia, Volume: 173 (2025).  xix, 312 pp.
By Zhenzhen Lu 

An interesting recent paper (Adithya Bhaskar, Xi Ye, & Danqi Chen, “Language Models that think, chat better”, arXiv.org 09/24/2025) starts like this:

THINKING through the consequences of one’s actions—and revising them when needed—is a defining feature of human intelligence (often called “system 2 thinking”, Kahneman (2011)). It has also become a central aspiration for large language models (LLMs).¹

The footnote:

¹Language models think, therefore, language models are?

Martha Gimbel et al., "Evaluating the Impact of AI on the Labor Market: Current State of Affairs", The Budget Lab (Yale) 10/1/2025:

Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy.

While this finding may contradict the most alarming headlines, it is not surprising given past precedents. Historically, widespread technological disruption in workplaces tends to occur over decades, rather than months or years. Computers didn’t become commonplace in offices until nearly a decade after their release to the public, and it took even longer for them to transform office workflows. Even if new AI technologies will go on to impact the labor market as much, or more, dramatically, it is reasonable to expect that widespread effects will take longer than 33 months to materialize.

Senator Ted Cruz making an impassioned speech at a Senate hearing on Tuesday about reaching a “bipartisan agreement” on crime:

“How about we all come together and say, ‘let’s stop murders?’

“How about we all come together and say ‘let’s stop rape?’

“How about we all come together and say ‘let’s stop attacking pedophiles’.” 

(Independent [10/1/25]; videos here and here)

In his remarks on "Stay hyDRAEted", Alec Strange noted that you can't avoid reading dorei no remonēdo ドレイのレモネーど  (intended to be "Drae's Lemonade") as "slave lemonade" (dorei / ドレイ / 奴隷 ["slave"]).  Coming at 奴隷 from the Sinitic side, my instinct is to read 奴隷 as beginning with an n- (or in a few cases l-), so it would have nothing to do with "Drae's".

From Alex Strange:

This sign I keep seeing at local events in the SF Bay bothers me every time I see it. (and then the Japanese people I've shown it to also thought it was unappetizing) So I thought I'd send it into languagelog.

The worst part is, it's not really wrong.ドレイのレモネーど (dorei no remonēdo) does mean Drae's Lemonade. It's just you can't avoid reading it as "slave lemonade" (dorei / ドレイ / 奴隷). Maybe they should pick a different other language?

This sequence has been extensively meme-ified:

Would You Work ‘996’? The Hustle Culture Trend Is Taking Hold in Silicon Valley.
The number combination refers to a work schedule — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — that has its origins in China’s hard-charging tech scene.
By Lora Kelley, NYT (Sept. 28, 2025)

The inverse of involution.

Working 9 to 5 is a way to make a living. But in Silicon Valley, amid the competitive artificial intelligence craze, grinding “996” is the way to get ahead. Or at least to signal to those around you that you’re taking work seriously.

In an interview yesterday, Ty Cobb (the lawyer, not the baseball player) answered a question from Geoff Bennett:

GEOFF BENNETT: How do you assess the way President Trump in his second term has asserted control over the Justice Department and many of the prosecutors who work for it, as compared to the first term?

TY COBB: Well, he appointed people who were clearly slavishly devoted to him and willing to break any ethical barriers or legal barriers to do his bidding.