On June 26, 2021, singer Michel Polnareff sent this mysterious message to his fans on Twitter: “I miss my pubes. » Of course, the interpreter of The doll who says no is a regular at organic confidences, he who, in 1972, had shown his buttocks on the posters announcing his concerts at the Olympia; but there, it seems that the thing is involuntary. Like thousands of us, Michel Polnareff was probably the victim of a somewhat facetious automatic message correction system, transforming his beloved ” audience “ in this hairy “analogue”. In any case, this is the hypothesis that was retained at the time by the newspapers that reported the incident.
In a less licentious register, a few months ago I sent a text message to my head of department offering her a draft article on a TV show featuring “a bunch of broccoli”. “Broccoli? »she replied. “Uh, I meant DIY! » Stunned by the great algorithmic nonsense of these systems which complete or correct the messages in a sometimes surprising way, we laughed from a distance.
By a kind of irony with comico-mythological overtones, the more the desire to rationalize our interactions asserts itself, the more our message ping-pongs seem to sink into what the German artist Hito Steyerl calls the “artificial stupidity”.
“I inquired with a dance school about class schedules during the week. The professor with whom I communicated by SMS answered my question very precisely. Delighted, I write to him: “Thank you, that’s great!” And I send the SMS at full speed. A few minutes later, I tell myself that I may have gone a little too fast and I check the text. Horror ! It had become: “Thank you, it’s genital!” After my explanations, the teacher answers me in turn that it was not serious and that he had understood that the spell checker had been there. But hey, he was still surprised… And me, not really comfortable! »says Carla, 26, a communication student.
Great moments of loneliness
As if on the edge of a typographical precipice, in terms of conversation at a distance, we are often just a letter from the abyss, such as Béatrice, a far-sighted user, who one day reminded one of her relatives not to forget her “dwarf shirt”.
“What is most likely to cause laughter in erroneous messages are incongruous and taboo words that phonetically resemble the original word”, explains Antoine Doucet, a computer science researcher at the University of La Rochelle, who participated in an international study aimed at generating automated humor by drawing inspiration from the errors produced by the correctors. But, sometimes, the machine scatters several irrelevant ingredients into the syntactic soup. “While hearing from a colleague who suspected he had Covid, I texted: ‘So finally cuckold?’ instead of: “So finally COVID?” Great moment of loneliness…”remembers Virginie Beaupérin, coordinator in an agricultural development association.
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