Kiddo: wonders why I am talking about disabling predictive text on the iPad she’s using

spouse: “well, Daddy is a monster who doesn’t even use autocorrect”

me: “excuse me, I think you mean I’m a ‘mnoster’”

Here, as with autocorrect and citation managers, my personal opinion is that any human who knows enough to use the tool critically knows enough to do the job themself. Maybe slower, sure, but slower isn’t always bad.

I knew my distrust of spellcheck would be validated one day! Seriously, though, this is bad news.

A few months ago, during a weekend where my family was out of town, I binge watched both seasons of « Au service de la France », a hilarious spy comedy available on Netflix. One of the running gags of the series is the (fictional) French secret service’s obsession with bureaucracy. So, for example, when the service suspects a mole in its midst, one of the responses is to make sure that every piece of paperwork is signed multiple times before being stamped twice. Thus, the main secretary of the service begins singing « tamponné, double tamponné » (“stamped, double stamped”) as she signs off on each form passed to her. This leads to some tension, as seen in the scene below:

Nooooo thank you. Don’t like this about Grammarly, don’t like this about Word, won’t like this about Google Docs. I am very skeptical of giving algorithms authority over style.

It amazes me that we all agree autocorrect spectacularly and regularly fails and yet believe that we can trust fundamentally the same tech to do harder work like grade homework, flag content, and suggest prison sentences.