This post nicely doubles as an explanation of why current-gen LLM's tendencies to spray emoji everywhere is annoying. Replacing bullet points with rocket ships and hand symbols pointing at things and spraying the emoji everywhere, rather than highlighting the things the emoji are trying to decorate, actually tends to obscure the thing being nominally highlighted under the massively over-powerful colorful symbols entirely. The initial visual impression of these texts is "a splattering of colorful symbols, with some incidental boring text around them" and it takes time and cognitive effort to filter out the blaring color, which has no useful content in it, and get to the real content.
I think this is more about age cohorts than anything intrinsic to emojis.
I’m also of an age where emojis are more distracting than informative, but I notice younger colleagues use them liberally and with significant information value.
Like if I were to write three bullets about the results of an experiment, I would use three actual bullet points for maybe describing the hypothesis, the test methodology, and the result.
Plenty of people I work with would use a light bulb bullet for the hypothesis, a clipboard for the methodology, and a chart up or down for results.
It’s overly cute to me, but it works for them, and it does kind of provide a visual index.
I specifically referenced LLM use because it seems to rather pointlessly just spray them everywhere. I didn't complain about them existing in general. I can old-fogey quibble with specific uses when humans add them with purpose but can also easily acknowledge it's just a taste matter. But LLMs seem to love that rocket ship, the green checkmark, that celebration emoji with the confetti coming out of the cardboard tube, and a few other ones that are only loosely related to the content. Also loves to point fingers at links, which are often already distinguished in the text. And seeing through all that is a real pain.
That your eyes are drawn more to color and shape than monochrome text is not an old person thing. That's a human thing.
In many cases this becomes an arms race too, where people start competing to make their content more colorful than the last, and that arms race has only one end, where the "engagement hooks" completely overwhelm the content. We've seen that one play out in a number of places already.
I really should have included the word "default" in there somewhere. It's effectively impossible to make any blanket statement about "what LLMs do" because it's one prompt away from doing almost literally anything else.
However, it's a style that currently has a lot of popularity.
Indeed, asking for answers in the style of Alice in Wonderland is one of my favorite things to do, like programming questions. The extra frisson from something so non-whimsical being expressed so whimsically via such a complicated technology goes all the way around the "cringe/cool" circle at least twice; you can decide for yourself where it lands in the end.
I did finally hear about the students getting wise to LLM style issue. I just saw a YouTube video about a student saying he would 1. have the LLM write his essay 2. rephrase the first two paragraphs in his own style 3. tell the LLM to rewrite the essay from step 1 in the style exemplified from his rewrite. AI detection tools, which are really "default AI detection tools", call it 0% AI. Stick a fork in them, they're done at that point. I don't think any "AI detection tool" is likely to defeat that, unless LLMs suddenly freeze in advancement for, oh, at least 3 years or so, which seems unlikely.
