One of the most important aspects of living languages is that they are constantly evolving. Human beings are not satisfied with using words as they are, they like to add their own interpretation to things. Some of us even become writers. ‘LOL’ is a good example of a letter combination with ever-changing meanings. When human honesty interpreted on the Internet is added to the perceptual stew of comprehension, it becomes more complicated.
Most of us are well beyond modern usage of the term. Gone are the days of lots of love, unless you’re an elderly person creating unintentionally hilarious Facebook posts with laughing emojis. Well-established in our current slang, lol means laughing out loud, but this is also a lie most of the time.
“Laughs” Typing unconsciously without making any sound. Knowing my deception, I hit send. Sure the meme I’m replying to was funny, but I never laughed out loud.”Right?” my meme-sender friend responds. “So much!” I double down. We all remain complicit.
Well, one man no longer stands by it. This man, no hero, Brian Moore, will not allow anyone to obfuscate this kind of truth. He created his LOL Verifier. It’s a device that checks to see if you can hear him laugh before sending a duplicate of his three-letter acronym.
Moore shows off his project Twitter post (opens in new tab) He uploaded a LOL Verifier video. He explains that he initially trained using Edge Impulse, a machine learning platform that is freely available to developers. He recorded about 3 minutes or about 100 samples of his own laughter to train the algorithm to recognize Bryan-loyal laughter out loud.
With the lapel mic on, Moore connects LOL Verifier as a bridge between your keyboard and your PC. If he doesn’t smile and type “lol”, LOL Verifier’s light turns red and automatically corrects it to something less deceptive, like “That’s funny.” Verified lol will be greenlit and laugh ticks and timestamps will also be recorded.
I made something called LOL Verifier: a device that lets you enter lol only if you actually laugh out loud pic.twitter.com/Gsc63yGEm0January 3, 2023
Of course, Moore never stops solving our lives one device at a time. He teases what I believe to be his LMAO verifier at the very end of the video. I can’t wait to see this light turn green.
A funny and silly invention, LOL Verifier actually makes a lot of sense. In the world of online interaction, there is a very real Poe’s Law. It states that parodies of extreme opinions can be perceived as sincere without an explicit knowledge of the intent of the message. Certainly, I have encountered countless misunderstandings due to the lack of inflection of words.
This is all the more confusing due to the heavy use of hyperbole in modern speech. (opens in new tab)In a world where literally everything is wonderful, words often lose their meaning. We know what each other means from context and our general human understanding of each other, but it can be very dark waters to navigate, especially online.
If I’ve sent a “laughed” message a few times in my life, a little device to know if someone actually laughed doesn’t feel so out of place. I don’t want to go through the crazy hell of training a machine on three minutes of my perfectly cooked laugh.