One of the most important aspects of a living language is that it is constantly evolving. People are never satisfied with just receiving and using a language. Some of them even become writers. It gets more complicated when "the sincerity of human interpretation on the Internet is added to the stew of perceptual understanding.

Most of us are quite familiar with the modern usage of the term. Gone are the days of loving, unless you are an elderly person who makes unintentionally hilarious Facebook posts with crying and laughing emojis. Firmly entrenched in our current vernacular, lol translates to laugh out loud, which is almost always also a lie.

"Laugh" I typed without thinking, making no audible sound at all. I pressed send, knowing my deception. Sure, the meme to which I replied was funny, but I never laughed out loud. The friend who sent me the meme responded, "I know, right? 'Right? I double down. We all remain complicit.

But there is one man I can't stand anymore. This man, or rather his hero, Brian Moore, will not allow anyone to cover up the truth like this. He has created the LOL Verifier. This device checks to see if you can hear laughter before allowing you to send its duplicitous three-letter acronym.

Moore shows off the project in a Twitter post (opens in new tab) where he uploaded a video of the LOL Verifier. He explains that he first trained it using Edge Impulse, a free machine learning platform for developers. He recorded about 100 samples of his own laughter, each lasting about 3 minutes, to train the algorithm to recognize laughter that was loud and true to Brian.

Moore, wearing a lapel microphone, connects the LOL Verifier as a bridge between his keyboard and his PC. When he types "lol" without laughing, the LOL Verifier's light turns red and automatically corrects his lie to something less deceptive, such as "That's funny." Verified laughs light up green, and the tick and timestamp of the recorded laugh are also displayed.

Of course, Moore has yet to stop modifying our lives one device at a time. At the end of the video he previews what is sure to be a very realistic LMAO verifier. I can't wait for the signal to turn green.

Although a fun and silly invention, the LOL verifier actually makes a lot of sense. In the world of online interaction, there is a very real Poe's law. It states that if the intent of the message is not clearly known, parodies of extreme opinions will be taken as sincere. And it is true. I can't count the number of times I've encountered misunderstandings due to lack of textual inflection.

This is even more confusing (open in new tab) because hyperbole is so often used in modern speech. In a world where literally everything is wonderful, words often lose their meaning. We know what we mean from context and general human understanding of each other, but especially online, we navigate very murky waters.

I've sent a few "I actually laughed" messages in my life. I just don't want to go through the crazy hell of having a machine train me to laugh for three minutes that I definitely created.