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?
It’s very common US English, it’s just not clear without explanation. Your bracketed suggestion is perfectly plausible, as are many other possibilities.
With respect, Jill Lepore, historian and journalist, better than many other NYer writers, need not accept your demand that she has the “correct” interpretation, as if putatively withheld.
Well, it’s, like, an insertion into the sentence, so you need commas on both sides or on neither.
Well, it’s like an insertion into the sentence, so you need commas on both sides or on neither.
It is an insertion, so in this case the second version is outright misleading…
Quotative “like” is not an insertion and is not spoken with the same intonation as hedging/filler “like”. Everybody except the New Yorker’s copyeditors knows this. (I’d like to see how this was punctuated before it went through copyediting; I’ll bet most of their writers are good enough listeners *not* to put an extra comma before quotative “like”.)
while i agree with our host that it’s too ambiguous as written, to my ear that “please” is pretty solidly about the shift from not paying attention to the LLM bubble to following the LLM shills’ directions about what aspects of it to pay attention to – e.g. the inside baseball of corporate staffing – rather than attending to the material effects of the bubble in the world. or, maybe more succinctly, it’s annoyance at the criterion of “newsworthy”-ness, both in the version that says none of it is worth reporting on, and in the version that carefully directs your attention to the three dancing walnut shells.
—
(elaborating a bit on what ktschwarz said)
the “like” in that sentence isn’t an insertion. it’s not the placeholder “like”, which is interchangeable to a substantial degree with “um”, “right”, “y’know” – it’s the modifier (modal? moodal? aspectual?) “like”, which indicates that what follows is not verbatim, and isn’t necessarily even close to the words that were said, but is a tonal/affective gist. to me, that doesn’t require a comma in front of it, and shouldn’t be given one.
“he’s like, you’re screwed, and i’m like, fuck my life” can be describing the same interaction as “he said i’d have to leave the car over the weekend, and i told him i needed it to get to work on saturday” or “he said, ‘it’s gonna take til monday for me to check it out properly’, and i said ‘well, shit. i’ve got a night shift tomorrow'”.
I suppose it was obvious to Lepore and Siddarth why Siddarth was eyerolling, but it’s not obvious to hat or me. The editor should have made allowances for us.
I might make a distinction between…
(a) I was, like, “this is bad”
(b) I was like, “this is bad”
…where (a) is a direct quote [of speech or thought] and (b) is a summary or paraphrase…
…but I would not trust myself to observe such a distinction in my own writing, so the chances of making it a general convention are slim.
No. It is not the job of a reporter to give an as-if-authoritative solution.
Oh, specifically quotative. Yes. But it really, really shouldn’t get a comma afterwards either.
“he’s like ‘you’re screwed’ and I’m like ‘fuck my life'” – quotative, with quotation marks.
If at all possible, it is the job of a reporter to ask for clarification before publishing.
So I asked Claude what this passage meant…. 😉
modifier (modal? moodal? aspectual?) — “Quotative” is the usual technical term, also applied to “goes” and “is all”. In I’m like, “Say What?!”: A New Quotative in American Oral Narrative (American Speech, 1990), the authors take a footnote to discuss it:
The paper also notes that “is like” can also introduce “a gesture or a nonlexicalized sound”, with an example: “And I was just like, [making a face].” When technology made it possible, people started writing “I’m like” followed by an image or emoji.
it really, really shouldn’t get a comma afterwards either
i don’t have super strong feelings about it, but i usually punctuate in sonic-score ways rather than Formal Rules ways, so those commas reflect a longer pause in my speech (whether inside the head or verbalized).
i feel more strongly that this “like” (gistitive? summaritive?) shouldn’t have quotation marks, though, because it is specifically not reporting the words a person said. that’s partly by analogy to the ways we mark that in summary-of-content versions that don’t use “like”: e.g. “i told him i needed it to get to work” vs “i told him, ‘i need it to get to work'”.
By the “Formal Rules” rozele mentions, there should definitely be a comma after quotative like—just as there is after parallel constructions with said, stated, asked, yelled, etc. The snippet that like introduces can get quotation marks if it is, in fact, known to be an exact quote. When it’s not, I often use italics, following the convention of italicizing what can be called “putative speech.”
How does anyone here assert of “like” that “specifically it is not reporting the words a person said”?
The question is, or should be, not what JL meant, but what DS meant, and what Mom thought was meant, but they may not be here.
I very strongly agree with rozele regarding commas, and the quotation marks as well. The NYer was enforcing the punctuation for formal written text on a colloquial register, whose intonations should be reflected in distinct punctuation. Just that one little comma alone gives the sentence a how-do-you-do-fellow-kids air (q.v.)
@SG: because that is how “like” has been observed to function when reporting speech (“all”, which works similarly, is less widely used), as opposed to its placeholder use. (it’s exhibit number something-big in the case of english figuring out odd ways to do grammatical things that it doesn’t have built into its T/M/A system.)
it isn’t invariably true, but when it’s not, in my experience it’s almost always using that presumption of tonal/affective summary to add a level of irony to what’s being reported (usually by a register mismatch). so these utterances express quite different relationships to the same quoted words:
he said, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”
he was like, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”
rozele, “it isn’t invariably true”–got it.
If at all possible, it is the job of a reporter to ask for clarification before publishing.
Exactly. And if you can’t get it, leave it out; it’s not your job to put into print every random remark that gets made in your presence.
Maybe the problem is the structure of the article – Siddarth disappears immediately after that quote and is never heard from again. One can imagine ways in which subsequent paragraphs could have made the context of her “please” clear enough that any irritation about not having had that explained earlier would have dissipated. (Heck, maybe there were such subsequent paragraphs that did not survive the editing process?)
“…if you can’t get it” or didn’t think you needed to, delete, according to LH “rules.” No.
He said what he said, unless you mistrust Jill Lepore.
If every ambiguous pronouncement by Trump went non-reported, citizens would hear from him exceedingly little.
You say that like it’s a bad thing …
Though I am not fond of hearing Trump, it is not a reporter’s job to exclude quoted text that may not please a copy editor.
Some might say that the fact that a sufficiently prominent person (such as Pres. Trump, but not only him) has said X is itself newsworthy, no matter how ambiguous or puzzling X may be as a statement. But the exchange between Ms. Siddarth and her mother had no inherent news value – it’s the sort of thing a New-Yorker-type long-form writer chooses to pick out of a mass of innumerable details similarly lacking in inherent news value and then chooses to feature in the article because it is hoped to add something to the narrative the writer is trying to present. And here, the writer did not use the detail to advance the narrative in a way that hat found satisfactory. Others’ tastes may differ.
He said what he said, unless you mistrust Jill Lepore.
So what? Are you under the impression that a reporter is duty-bound to put into print every single remark uttered by everyone she interviews? I’m sure Siddarth (a she, by the way) said all sorts of things that didn’t wind up in the piece, as did everyone else Lepore quoted; I shudder to think of the number of hours of interviews that got boiled down. My point is not that she should have imposed her own interpretation, it’s that (as I said before, but apparently it needs repeating) if you can’t get clarification, leave it out; it’s not your job to put into print every random remark that gets made in your presence. I’m not sure what your problem is with that obvious statement.
[…Or what JWB said.]
Late to the party, I join my betters in not knowing what “Please” intended.
Here’s a guess. Please= For heaven’s sakes, Mom, don’t you think I already know that?
I mean, like, come on!
I fault the New Yorker and the author for inclusion of this inscrutable morsel.
Before the commas consume me, I have to ask if anyone has ever come across scrutable in the wild?
Pronouns used to refer to Ms. Siddarth in this thread have varied, and some of my own earlier comments suggest I was initially beguiled by the prior usage of others. Although more substantively I may not have noticed that Siddarth was being used as a surname here rather than a (typically male in my experience) given name. I’ve known a fellow with the name – possibly not spelled the same way – who had adopted the very Americanized-seeming nickname “Sid,” which was at least as good as “Moe” for Mohammed.
I do not defend the New Yorker style guide and its contortions. I do suggest, heresy or not, that Jill Lepore, the reporter, who knows more than I on this, thought it worth including. I prefer to hear from her, apparently more so than some other folk.
I too would like to hear from her.
The only person with the given name Siddartha who I know personally also goes by “Sid.” I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?
I agree with cuchuflete regarding the meaning of the Utterance in this context.
Even the archived link is currently leading me to a page demanding that I subscribe, so I can’t speak to the full context. But I would actually have assumed that interpretation by default, myself, and not have taken it as impenetrably ambiguous; though, having been primed by others’ responses, I can now see what they mean.
But the dress is definitely black and blue when I look at it, not white and gold.
Even the archived link is currently leading me to a page demanding that I subscribe, so I can’t speak to the full context.
Sorry, that didn’t happen when I clicked it. This one should work.
Yes it does, thanks.
I think my impression holds in the full context, though clearly from others’ comments YMMV.
On the article: Askell is very much part of the “AI” boosterism machine. What she is up to is shifting the moral problem from where it actually exists, in the decisions of the users of LLMs, to the LLM itself, in line with her unapologetic anthropomorphicising of LLMs.
This is morally incoherent (as you’d expect of the ex-wife of William MacAskill, frankly. All part of the TESCREAL gang.) It’s like saying that the bomb itself is morally responsible for killing somebody, rather than the bomb-thrower.
We can’t make Claude ethical. It’s not a person or a rational agent: “ethical” no more applies to Claude than to a spirochaete.
What we could do is try to prevent unethical uses of Claude and its breed. It may help (though it can’t solve the actual problem) if we can arrange for booby-traps to be set within the mechanism of the LLM to make unethical uses more difficult (“guardrails”), though this is likely to founder on the fact that Claude doesn’t know what it’s being used for. It doesn’t know anything at all. But even if such measures do help, they are not making Claude “ethical.” That’s a category error: it’s the users who need to be constrained to ethical behaviour.
The article itself is largely about attempts to constrain “AI” use, and doesn’t simply swallow Askell’s line, I’m glad to say.
Incidentally, the tale that Claude was responsible for the recent Iran school-bombing war crime is false. Claude merely featured as a user-friendly interface for a longstanding largely-automated target-selection process which is woefully bad at avoiding “collateral damage” (because the deployers of the system don’t really care.) This was not “decided” by a LLM, and the media reports to the effect that it was are merely yet more of the “AI” hype machine (but in particularly gruesome bad taste.)
Yeuch. Let’s go back to talking about “please.”
Re: DE’s comments about unethical users, this is needed context to understand Anthropic’s leaders’ insistence on guardrails for the use if their products by the eggcess-lead “Dept. of War”.
The feigned moral outrage of the deskbound warriors at not being permitted to do whatever they please…
“Moe” for Mohammed.—The UK instances I can think of [Salah, Farah, Ibrahim] are spelt “Mo”; my impression is that (relatedly or coincidentally) “Moe” is less common (representing any name) in UK than in US.
@rozele:
i feel more strongly that this “like” (gistitive? summaritive?) shouldn’t have quotation marks, though, because it is specifically not reporting the words a person said. that’s partly by analogy to the ways we mark that in summary-of-content versions that don’t use “like”: e.g. “i told him i needed it to get to work” vs “i told him, ‘i need it to get to work’”.
Your analogy to indirect speech doesn’t quite work. Indirect speech shifts tenses / pronouns, “like” doesn’t. If he said he hated me, he wasn’t like he hated me, he was like “I hate you”. That’s a quote, whether he actually uttered those exact words. He said something along the lines of “I hate you”. He acted as if he wanted to say “I hate you”.
I don’t think you can deduce the intended meaning from the written copy. The meaning of “please” is expressed through its pronunciation.
Maybe? But I’m having trouble imagining exactly how a particular pronunciation would provide disambiguation.
I don’t think you can deduce the intended meaning from the written copy. The meaning of “please” is expressed through its pronunciation.
Ok, I’ll play.
“Please” she whined, elongating the word, going from a high pitched screech through a decrescendo, ending with a barely audible whimper.”
“Please!”. The word was spat out, staccato.
Pronunciation together with both context and physical cues may help with understanding, but pronunciation alone may not be sufficient.
But those don’t help discriminate among all the possibilities that people have suggested for the “Please” we’re talking about.
Exactly.
I think tone of voice might be sufficient to either confirm or disconfirm the theory I offered above that this is “please” as “An expression of annoyance, impatience or exasperation.” But hat wants more, because he thinks Lepore should have made it clear *why* Siddarth reacted thusly to her mother’s statement.
An imperfect analogy: Imagine a scene in a narrative ends with a character saying “what’s that?” but you can’t tell what the character is looking at or pointing at (whether literally or metaphorically). It’s not that you can’t figure out which sense/usage of the word “that” is being deployed – it’s that that sense/usage is deictic so you need other information to identify the referent of “that.” Maybe it’s completely unclear or maybe there are several obvious candidates but not enough information to choose among them.
One reason that analogy’s imperfect is that we know here what utterance triggered Siddarth’s expression of annoyance, impatience or exasperation. In a dialogue where one character says X and then the other says “well, that pisses me off” or “how exasperating” or something like that, the reaction statement isn’t actually ambiguous. It gives you potentially useful information about the speaker’s current state of mind and is unambiguous as far as that goes. You may well wish to know more about *why* the catalyst elicited that reaction or at least brought a pre-existing state of mind to the surface, but that’s another issue. And we’re also back to the problem that “on one occasion Siddarth became annoyed or impatient or exasperated in reaction to something her mom said” is even if a true fact about the world not a fact of sufficient importance to pass on to the subscribers to The New Yorker without connecting it to something else.
But those don’t help discriminate among all the possibilities that people have suggested for the “Please” we’re talking about.
Ayuh!
I didn’t want to simply yell, “Horsefeathers!” in reply to Dave Wilton’s suggestion, but you are obviously correct.
This is a fascinating thread for many reasons, but the meaning of “Please” seems pretty clearly to be a comment on the reversal of the situation from too little attention to “way too much!”
In that context, my own internal translator immediately renders it as “Gimme a break!”
I think the meaning of “and I’m, like, ‘Please.’” is similar to ‘give me a break’, or ‘arrrgh!’. An expression of frustration.