When scrolling TikTok the other night, I was surprised to see Merriam-Webster pop up in my feed. Even more surprised to see that the American dictionary company was spruiking its upcoming “Large Language Model”. Except that Merriam-Webster wasn’t getting into AI: it was taking the absolute piss out of it.
In the dictionary maker’s video that has so far racked up more than a million views, it opens by proclaiming the “dawn of the AI era”. Stop me if you’ve heard that line before from nearly every consumer tech company on the planet.
Boasting more than 217,000 “parameters” and claims of no hallucinations, what smelled like a cheap AI cash-in instead turned out to be a clever promo from Merriam-Webster for the 12th edition of its Collegiate Dictionary. Well played, you word-loving fiends.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to see dictionaries being sassy; Merriam-Webster and Britannica have sued Perplexity for alleged plagiarism, after all.
