[deadpannini]

The opening qualifies as sarcastic:

> I am so happy not to live in an American small town. Because whenever I'm shown some small town in the States it is populated with all kinds of monsters among whom flesh hungry zombies, evil aliens and sinister ghosts are most harmless.

Mocking irony, in the context of a negative review.

[gleenn]

Sarcasm is saying one thing and meaning the opposite. If monsters are most harmless, then also not wanting to live there makes logical sense and isn't backwards. So that's straightforward mockery, not sarcastic.

[ajross]

> Sarcasm is saying one thing and meaning the opposite.

What I find fascinating here is how generative AI has inverted all our sci-fi tropes. I mean, sure: you're right! That's the way "sarcasm" is defined in most dictionaries. But you and I both know that as the language is actually used, the term means a whole host of techniques used to convey negative emotional content in language that is not directly negative. Your (correct!) dictionary pedantry isn't interesting to me. We've been here before.

But GPT-4 wasn't trained on dictionary rules. It was trained on actual language. And it's actually better at inferring this stuff than the pedants are. Our introvert brains have trouble teasing meaning like this and have to hide behind rules and structure. The computer doesn't.

To wit: the robot is us.