Time for another episode of Ask the Hatters! I was reading Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece “Does A.I. Need a Constitution?” (March 23, 2026; archived) when I found myself flummoxed by the quote at the end of this passage:
A.I. companies’ democratic experiments quickly came to an end. This has made many people more rather than less anxious about A.I., especially in the past few months, owing not least to the newsworthy departures from leading A.I. companies of a number of high-profile safety and alignment researchers. “‘Shoot, the world is not paying enough attention to this’ is a way we all used to feel,” [Divya] Siddarth told me. “Now my mom calls me and says, ‘I saw on the Indian news that some guy resigned from Anthropic,’ and I’m, like, ‘Please.’”
I like to think I’m pretty well versed in the ways of spoken and written English after many decades of speaking and reading it, and I can usually interpret from context what an expression means even if it’s used in an unexpected way, but I have absolutely no idea what the purport of “I’m, like, ‘Please’” might be. Is it “Please, why are you telling me this?” Is it “Please, that’s bullshit”? Is it “Please, that’s not even news”? What’s it all about, Alfie?
= “oh, puh-leeze” in some dialects, as I read it.
But yeah, I can’t tell what she meant, either.
“oh, puh-leeze” in some dialects, as I read it.
Sure, but as you say, that doesn’t help with interpretation. (I fault Lepore for this: it’s fine to quote your sources exactly, but you owe it to your readers to help them understand what you quote. Did she even understand it, or did she just think it was nice and punchy?)
In the context of the world not paying enough attention, I’m going for “Please, this is not even news.”
Is it more less the same “please” as in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bitch,_please?
The context appears to be, “before, we couldn’t get anyone to pay attention. Now, it gets so much attention that some dude’s resignation from Anthropic makes the news 8000 miles away.” I’m guessing that the “Please” here isn’t directly a response to his mom; rather, it may reflect the speaker’s frustration that notwithstanding that shift, he and others who share his beliefs have no more ability to influence events — likely less — than they had before.
I think it’s mainly an expression of frustration, like ‘WTF’, without a single specific meaning.
That’s very possible, but in that case I don’t see what the anecdote adds to the piece. (“A random person I interviewed gibbered and twitched.”)
Further excerpts
—
The Collective Intelligence Project also helped launch an initiative with OpenAI, funding a series of experiments in “Democratic Inputs to A.I.” Divya Siddarth, a young Stanford graduate, started C.I.P. in 2022. “The goal was to work on democratic governance of A.I.,” she told me. “People thought, That’s so cute, what a fun thing to do! But no one thought it was particularly important. It’s not like we democratically govern Google Sheets.” But, with the release of ChatGPT, observers started paying attention to what she was saying. “Once you buy into the concept that A.I. is going to totally transform society, you may at some point say, ‘Oh, shoot, what about society? They should have a say.’ ”
…
Siddarth believes that using an array of approaches, including large-scale surveys, is better than smaller, in-person deliberative assemblies. “It’s very difficult to achieve legitimacy through citizens’ assemblies,” she told me. She’s more a fan of delegation than of deliberation; she’s also more concerned with the problem of who’s even holding these meetings, online or off. If it’s the companies, she said, “are we just doing glorified user testing?” Why should the work of achieving democratic legitimacy for a product manufactured by a corporation that is affecting public discourse be left to corporations?
…
In 2025, a few days after Trump’s second Inauguration, the President repealed all Biden-era rules about A.I. with an executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” A.I. companies’ democratic experiments quickly came to an end. This has made many people more rather than less anxious about A.I., especially in the past few months, owing not least to the newsworthy departures from leading A.I. companies of a number of high-profile safety and alignment researchers.
—
the last paragraph is before the excerpt Hat asks about. Taking the totality of the above into account, I would say:
1. Siddarth is concerned about democratic legitimacy and sees a varied set of democratic checking and guidance mechanisms as necessary.
2. Anthropic may not have agreed with her approach completely but accepted the need for democratic legitimacy.
3. Trump has removed corresponding mandatory legislation.
4. People who shared Siddarths concerns are leaving Anthropic.
5. Awareness of the departures has become widespread, but not awareness of the motivation for the departures, on which Siddarth is an expert.
6. Please means, “Of course, what other option did these people have? If you had been studying this as I have, you would know this.
That makes sense, but the reader shouldn’t have to memorize and parse the whole article in order to figure out what’s being said; Lepore should have added something to make it clear.
But is the “please” here really any more opaque than what wiktionary gives as sense 2 of the interjection: “An expression of annoyance, impatience or exasperation”? I think the “bitch, please” idiom I referenced above is just a specific application of that.
But that’s very opaque indeed! How exactly do you interpret “An expression of annoyance, impatience or exasperation” in this particular context? That’s exactly the point at issue.
A New Yorker article is not a modernist poem, and “should not mean but be” is not a desirable approach.
Siddarth’s Mom: “Oh, I just saw on the news that some guy resigned from Anthropic.”
Siddarth (in annoyed/impatient/exasperated tone): “Oh please.”
That seems like a perfectly plausible interaction, although admittedly mom might then ask Siddarth why he was reacting that way, although maybe she’d just correctly figure out that it would be better to change the subject. Or mom might have had pre-existing context that easily accounted for her son’s reaction, which perhaps the journalist here had not adequately provided.
I’m not saying it’s not a perfectly plausible interaction, I’m saying it shouldn’t be quoted without adequate grounding. I’m sure Siddarth and her mom have all sorts of interactions that make sense to them at the time but would leave the rest of us at a loss to interpret.
The New Yorker continues its bizarre house style of putting a comma before quotative “like”. Nobody else does this, not even the New York Times.
“Please, that’s not even news” was my best guess at the “Please”, but yeah, it was unclear to me too.
“I’m, like” is simply a version of “I said,” while “like” between phrases is the new “um” or “you know.” My favourite instance of these usages arrived on a greeting card: “It’s, like, your birthday. And I’m, like, Happy Birthday”
and I’m, like, ‘Please’[, now people are paying *too* much attention to this stuff]
Might be more common in Indian English?