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derinthescarletpescatarian · 27 days ago

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what’s the story about the generative power model and water consumption? /gen

There's this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You'll see people say shit like "generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!" and bullshit like that, and it's just... not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went "oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!" and then just... made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I'm given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don't use them so I don't know the details, but I'm told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.

To be clear, I don't like generative AI. I'm sure it's got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I've seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let's not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It's turned the usability of search engines from "rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads" into "almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results", especially if you're looking for images. It's a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I've seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I'd say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is... not great. And the fact that it's often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals ("you don't have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!") is also not great.

But there are real labour and product quality concerns with generative AI, and there's hysterical bullshit. And the whole "AI is magically destroying the planet via climate change but my four hour twitch streaming sesh isn't" thing is hysterical bullshit. The instant I see somebody make this stupid claim I put them in the same mental bucket as somebody complaining about AI not being "real art" -- a hatemobber hopping on the hype train of a new thing to hate and feel like an enlightened activist about when they haven't bothered to learn a fucking thing about the issue. And I just count my blessings that they fell in with this group instead of becoming a flat earther or something.

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libraford · 3 months ago

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Like... when I'm pointing out that a recipe image is AI, the purpose is not to shame them for posting AI, because even people who are familiar with the tells will sometimes fall for it.

I want you to have reasonable expectations about your food.

Because when I see this:

I remember this:

Which was a full decade prior to AI-based misinformation, and just how many people were pissed off that the Pinterest post misled them.

And even more-working in a craft store during the Pinterest heyday:

"We want to make this." Shows a picture of:

-a marimo moss ball terrarium in a light bulb.

-a resin-treated natural wooden shelf with glow in the dark resin in the cracks

-a really complex diorama made using museum grade resin and hand-painted figures by a miniatures artist

...to name a few.

"I'm sorry, but we do not carry (unfinished wood pieces, light reactive resin powders, live marimo moss balls, museum grade resin). Is there a tutorial attached with a materials list? No? I'm sorry, we don't have those. You can make something like this with what we have, but it won't turn out the same as in the photo. You want it exactly like the photo? I'm sorry, we can't special order these items, they're not featured on our list of vendors. I'm sorry, no, I don't know where to get them. Oh, you want me to walk you through the steps of making it since there's no tutorial? I can really only guess, but it looks like... oh, you want someone who knows for sure? I'm sorry, but no one here is terribly familiar with the process. You might see if you can reverse image search and find the source of the image. You say you want to speak to my manager? You say I'm being rude to you? You say I should be going out of my way to make you happy? You say you'll leave a 1 star review?..."

Etc.

If you ask a bartender to make you the 'celestial milkshake' and show them the photo, they are going to go through the same course that I just went through, but with mixology. They are going to explain that cotton candy dissolves when put in liquid, that edible glitter doesn't look like that, that the liquers listed in the recipe don't interact well, and that the image you have given them is essentially concept art by someone who has never even worn an apron.

Having reasonable expectations for your food is not by any means shaming you for falling for AI. It is saving you the embarrassment and them the frustration.

#the lady arguing that these can be done #has doubled down #and people keep pointing it out that these are not real things #and she refuses to believe them #its embarrassing

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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months ago

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What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #ai #economics #business #hype #bubbles #bubblenomics #residue

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ms-demeanor · 4 months ago

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The thing about LLMs is that they're like cars that have a touchscreen on the console; it's more expensive and worse than what came before in almost all circumstances.

And like car touchscreens it's something that I suspect that the vast majority of consumers dislike and would prefer not to use.

But that doesn't mean that touchscreens are bad it just means they don't belong in cars.

It *IS* a massive problem that "AI" is being shoved at us by a bunch of people who invested WAY too much into AI and are trying to make a return on their investment. It is *ALSO* a problem that "AI" is a terrible name for the pattern interpretation tools that tech companies have dumped billions of dollars into so people are being told that a lot of things that are just pretty basic algorithmic tools are "AI," which makes the whole thing feel overhyped, oversold, and useless (which it is for a tremendous number of people!)

But I get really frustrated with claims that AI slop is what ruined google search (google search has been ruined for a long time; when their goal became "people need to do more searches so we can serve them more ads" instead of "we need to return the best results for our users" it was destroyed and that had nothing to do with AI and everything to do with a profit motive) or that AI is why we're being inundated by spammers (spammers have been a problem for a VERY long time) or that it's impossible to find good info these days because the internet is full of garbage AI articles to generate clicks (that has been the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE in terms of research for MUCH LONGER than GPT4 has been around it is called search engine optimization and if you haven't had your results full of poorly written non-information listicles for the last seven years I suspect you haven't been doing quite the same volume of searching as I have been).

These are known problems that are being exacerbated by this particular kind of tool, but the problem with phishing isn't that the emails are extremely tailored to particular users, it's that the world is chock full of scammers who are incentivized to treat people like shit for money.

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kvothbloodless · 6 months ago

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Man the new google search AI is almost impressive in terms of how bad it is, in terms of PR/public ideas about AI. Like. I dont think you could make it much worse if you tried.

Generative AI has so many uses, Google. Why on fucking Earth are you trying to use it for something weve Known its terrible at (answering questions accurately)?? Like, they were originally planning to use the gpt alone for this sort of thing, before realizing that the gpt hallucinated too much for that to be workable. And then somehow decided that instead, just having it summarize whatever random shit it found (apparently) without analyzing/fact checking at all, would be better???

Not to mention, because it summarizes Specific results from the search, rather than relying on what its learned from its training database, it now Does look like its plagiarizing (obviously in a situation like this, plagiarism doesnt really apply. But like. Since in this particular instance it Is copying answers form websites directly, it only reinforces the idea that Alll generative AI is plagiarism).

Anyways, I dont actually care all that much because its easy to ignore. But like. Jesus christ was this a bad decision on every front

#google ai #as someone whos been pretty vocally pro-ai here #please for the love of god get rid of this fucking ai function #ai has so many good uses that are not this #tracking

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not-having-an-eldritch-blast · 4 months ago

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I like to read the terrible Google AI search results as if it's advice from Trexel Geistman

#tell me it doesn't sound like things he'd say #like the glue pizza #and “geologists recommend eating at least one small rock per day”#stellar firma #pippa yaps

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yeehawbvby · 2 years ago

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Hello! While I was doing the classes and Salvatore (the language teacher) gives you words in other languages and asks what they mean. He did this with 'I love you' and that gave an idea. What if reader and Arven are both in that class and Salvatore notices Arven's crush on reader (I feel like Arven's the type to stare at his crush and then get caught and get all shy about it) and tries to encourage him to confess. Sry this was a bit long. Hope you have a wonderful day/night!

WAIT STOP this is so frickin’ cute wtf 😭😭😭 Don’t be sorry at all for the long prompt!! The more details regarding what you’re looking for, the better :D

I hope you don’t mind that I went with a gendered reader – it just kinda naturally flowed out of me this way ;;w;; Enjoy! x

Love Languages | Arven x F!Reader

Rating: Teen+ | WC: 1,744

I have a crush on my best bud. I can’t help it. It happens, it’s not a big deal, and she definitely doesn’t need to know. But, I’m unfortunately far from subtle in my affections.

She’s just… so damn pretty. The way her hair shines no matter the lighting, the glimmer in her eyes when she’s excited, the blush on her little cheeks when she’s praised. With her brains, strength, and kindness on top of all that, it’s hard not to be totally enamored.

Enamored enough to, y’know… check her out, every once in a while. I guess.

One time, Salvatore caught me in the act. She was answering a question of his during one of his lectures, and my eyes remained on her just barely too long. When he finished addressing her, our teacher looked at me, and his eyes widened. He glimpsed at her again, then back at me, and he winked.

Now, I know Salvatore’s a good guy. He’s friendly, he often has his students’ and Pokémons’ best interests in mind, and he’s lackadaisical when it comes to grading and due dates… But I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t a little shit.

Whether I’m peeking at my buddy in class or grabbing lunch with her in the cafeteria, if Salvatore sees it, he gives me a look. Like, one of those “I see, I see…” sort of looks. It’s terrible. I could only ever hope to Arceus that her steel trap brain is oblivious to it.

Today, little buddy and I talked a bit before class – easy enough, with her sitting diagonally in front of me – and eventually Salvatore mosied on in, with his typical greeting. “My dear friends!” and so on. My bud turned around towards her desk, I got out my notebook and stuff, and everything went how it usually does, at least at first.

“Now, mes amis – my friends, that is! I’ve decided to change up our typical lesson format a bit.”

Oh?

“In le cours d’ajourd’hui – today’s class – we will learn about a very special phrase that you can put to use when the time is juuust right!”

Salvatore smiles and scans the room as usual, searching for a reaction. But this time, before continuing, his eyes linger on me.

“Ai shiteiru! Je t’aime! Te amo! Ich liebe dich! Does anyone know what these phrases mean?”

After a few quiet moments, little buddy raises her hand, and I notice what seems like a small blush on the side of her cheek. Salvatore calls on her to answer, and it comes out… timid?

“T-they mean, um… ‘I love you.’”

Hearing those words from her mouth makes my heart pound in my chest.

“Très bien!” My eyes feel like they’re gonna pop right out of my skull as Salvatore turns to me. “It’s so very important to express your feelings about things to others, you know!”

…He’s scheming.

Salvatore slowly walks across the class, inspecting us all. “So, mes merveilleux élèves – my wonderful students – I’m going to be setting you up into pairs.”

No.

When he reaches my row, he stops. He’s watching me. “I want you to practice amongst each other!”

Nope!

“I’ll supply you with worksheets, made by yours truly,” he saunters over to the podium and grabs a stack of papers, “so that you all have prompts to work with! That way none of you will find yourselves à une perte pour les mots – at a loss for words, that is!”

No thank you!

Whispers erupt amongst my peers. “Is he serious?” “This is so humiliating…” “What if I get paired with… you know?!” My eyes wide, I look around, studying everyone’s expressions and eavesdropping on their reactions to today’s lesson. At least I’m not the only one who’s worried.

My gaze lands on my buddy, and she’s staring down at her desk. The same flush that coated her cheeks when she answered his question is still there – if anything, it looks a bit darker now.

“Oh my!” Salvatore laughs, interrupting the chatter. “Have I embarrassed you all, my friends?”

No shit, man.

My brain turns to oatmeal as I zone out on my notebook. Salvatore continues instructing, and he’s probably trying to give me some kind of “wink wink, nudge nudge” of sorts, but it’s falling on blind eyes and deaf ears.

He wouldn’t pair me up with her… would he? It would make the most sense for him to just pair us as we’re paired in our desks, right? Right?!

Two by two, the other students begin to shuffle around. And eventually, Salvatore calls my buddy’s name… followed by mine.

“Come get your assignments, you two!”

I hate him.

I pack up my things, as does little buddy, and we both make our slow trek up to the front of the class.

As Salvatore gives us our work for the day, he says, “Bonne chance – good luck!”

Fuck off.

Sighing, I stare down at the paper in my hand while we make our way to one of the last sets of empty desks available. My bud’s uncharacteristically quiet as we settle in, grabbing our pens and reading over the worksheets in front of us.

“So…” I prompt, wanting to get this over with. I can’t even look at her right now. “Y-you ready?”

When I don’t hear a verbal response, I look to my side, and she nods. Her face is still rosy, and she won’t look at me, either. Nerves getting the best of me, I do the only thing I really know how to do in a situation like this: I ramble.

“Er, the first part here is to just match up the phrases with what languages they are. Easy enough…”

“Mhm,” my friend hums quietly.

“Alright, number one…” I can’t even bring myself to say the words out loud. Why is this so embarrassing?! At the end of it all, this is nothing more than an assignment, right? “...is Johtoan.” I peer up, and while writing down her answer, my bud nods.

This continues until we complete the first section of our work. Maybe this won’t be so bad… as long as we don’t talk much, we’ll avoid any embarrassment, right?

“How are we doing, vous petits tourtereaux?” Salvatore asks. I don’t know what that last part meant, but little buddy seems to. Her eyes widen and she tenses up, her cheeks flushing.

I squint at him. A look that says “You suck, and this feels like betrayal.” While doing so though, I verbally answer, “N-nous c’est bien…?”

“Nous sommes bons, but I appreciate the attempt, Master Arven!” Salvatore winks, before suggesting, “You know, practice makes perfect.” Yeah, and? “Why don’t you two discuss the lesson amongst yourselves?” No. “You won’t improve without expérience de vie réelle – real life experience – after all!”

“Er, we’re alri–”

“O-okay.”

My head whips towards my buddy. When I look back up at Salvatore, he has a menacing grin on his face. He mutters something in Kalosian before moving onto another pair of students. I turn to my left again, and watch as my friend places down her pen, before shyly peering up at me to her right.

Are her pupils always so big?

It’s probably just the lighting. Or I’m just seeing shit. Whatever.

“So…” she mutters. She looks down at her paper and fidgets with the corner. “We can just… go down the list here, I guess?”

“Yeah, sounds good.” That accidentally came out as a whisper, but she heard it well enough to begin.

My buddy clears her throat, then mutters, “Um…” she pauses briefly, shifting herself to sit facing towards me. I do the same. “J-je t’aime.”

Her eyes almost look hopeful as they flicker up to mine, then back down at her worksheet. Oh Arceus this is gonna be harder than I thought.

“...Wǒ ài nǐ.”

More silence. Swallowing a lump in her throat, my buddy furrows her brows, then looks me in the eye. It’s like she’s hyping herself up… so cute. “Te amo…!”

Oh.

T-that had more of an effect than I expected.

My eyes widen, and hers follow suit. She looks down promptly, while my cheeks redden to match hers. I quietly keep the flow going. “Ai shiteiru.”

“T-ti amo.”

“Didn’t you just say that one?” I softly tease. I’m relieved to see her shoulders relax a little, and her beautiful lips curve into one of her beautiful smiles, as I make light of what’s going on.

She shakes her head. “Different languages.”

Mirroring her grin, I keep up the antics. “Bullshit.”

“It’s true! Ask Salvatore.”

I glimpse over at him, and having heard his name, he’s already looking at us. I shake my head at him and turn my attention back to my friend. “N-no, it’s alright.”

We fall into another silence, so I go again. “Salanghaeyo.”

Gnawing the cap of her pen, little buddy meets my eye again. “I-ich liebe dich.”

Fuck.

In a trance, we both seem to not want to pull our irises away from one another… so we keep going, just rambling based off of the word banks in our brains.

“Mahal kita.”

“Ya tebe lyublyu.”

“Se agapó.”

“Volim te.”

“I love you.”

Both sets of eyes widen.

I… wasn’t supposed to use our own language.

See, I could easily pass this off as an easy mistake now, but something is stopping me. I take in a deep breath, my eyes scanning my friend’s face. Somehow, her eyes focus even harder on me. Like she’s having some sort of revelation. Like… like she wants me to say more.

I wonder if…?

“...I love you,” I repeat, adding her name to the end. Trying to look more serious, in spontaneous hopes that she knows I’m serious.

Taken aback, she squeaks. Her mouth opens and shuts a few times. “I…” she pauses, looks down, then looks at me again. “I love you… Arven…”

…!

“You…? Wait, a-actually?”

Fidgeting with her pen in her hands – focusing hard on the way she’s twirling it between her fingers – she nods. She grins to herself, too shy to meet my eyes.

“I… oh my god, I love you!”

I look towards Salvatore. My mouth’s agape. I silently mouth the words, “IT WORKED,” in his direction. He beams, and a broad smile forms across his features.

…Salvatore, you sly motherfucker.

You actually did it.

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