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This weekend, I discovered Olivia Rodrigo. I know I’m over two years late to the party, but better late than never, right? Some of the stuff off her new album is pretty fun. I digress… my wife and I were also talking recently about whether or not we used to fight with our siblings.

When my wife was young, if one of them said something mean they’d have to say three nice things in return. Typically the nice comments ended up being something along the lines of “I like your shoes, I like your teeth, I like your hair.” Pretty surface level, but we’ll take it. Also, this is a pretty good way to diffuse any tension there might be.

What if we implemented something like that online? With an LLM you could likely detect negative speech as someone types it and then force them to make 3 nice comments, even if they are superficial.

This would likely 1) deter some people from being mean because of the work involved 2) further boost engagement for the person receiving negative feedback and 3) lead to people creating some sort of code language that couldn’t be detected to be mean. People are innovating (not only in good ways).

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